Participants’ personal note-taking in meetings and its value for automatic meeting summarisation

Abstract

This paper reports the results of novel quantitative research on multiple people's personal note-taking in meetings with the long-term aim of aiding the creation of innovative meeting understanding applications. We present three experiments using a large number of group meetings taken from the Augmented Multi-party Interaction meeting corpus. Statistical techniques were employed for this work. Our findings suggest that temporal note-taking overlap information and the semantic content of the written private notes taken by many meeting participants both point to the majority of the most informative meeting events. Thus, the characteristics of note-taking can be seen as a contributing feature for new automatic meeting summarisation approaches and for the development of future meeting browser environments that better support the needs of individuals and organisations.

Technology and note-taking in the classroom, boardroom, hospital room, and courtroom

“…The data bore this out; those workers who took detailed notes contributed the least to the conversation [39]. However, another study found that workers tended to take frequent, short notes during meetings, and that the quantity of notes was positively correlated with the amount of spoken words during the meeting [40]. Both studies reported that individuals' note-taking strategies were idiosyncratic.…”

“…Workplace notes are likely to be less complete than lecture notes, because workplace presentations nearly always involve some visual content [43], and slides are also often provided in advance [44], both of which reduce note quantity. While some prior work, e.g., Kiewra et al [45], suggests that more content will be written down in a small group or face-to-face setting, more ecologically valid research suggests the opposite; far fewer notes tend to be taken in small group meetings [39,40,46].…”

To Call or to Recall? That's the Research Question

“…In a previous work, we disclosed initial findings related to some of these topics, which pointed to the importance of studying more adapted forms of phone call annotation [Carrascal et al 2012]. In this article, we expand our previous work by tackling all topics mentioned previously and using a larger dataset with increased statistical power (CL: 95%, MOE: ±3.4%).…”

“…Alternatively, notes can be used as memory cues for participants to recall events of a meeting rather than being full recordings of the activity [Whittaker et al 2008]. Moreover, these notes can serve as markers to add structure to meeting recordings [Whittaker et al 1994;Geyer et al 2005;Wilcox et al 1997;Bothin and Clough 2012]. In both cases, attention and active participation is required, and taking notes at the same time may become an additional cognitive load [Piolat et al 2005] that reduces the person's ability to participate [Whittaker et al 2008].…”

“…Previous work has focused mostly on investigating how people take notes during work-related meetings [Bothin and Clough 2012;Whittaker et al 2008;Geyer et al 2005;Wilcox et al 1997] and in other general settings [Kleek et al 2011;Bernstein et al 2008;Lin et al 2004]. Indeed, mobile phone calls could be seen as two-person meetings, but they are quite different from formal meeting contexts: calls are usually less planned, less structured, shorter in time, and performed in mobile contexts.…”