Learning to Rank Utterances for Query-Focused Meeting Summarization

Query-focused meeting summarization(QFMS) aims to generate a specific summary for the given query according to the meeting transcripts. Due to the conflict between long meetings and limited input size, previous works mainly adopt extract-then-summarize methods, which use extractors to simulate binary labels or ROUGE scores to extract utterances related to the query and then generate a summary. However, the previous approach fails to fully use the comparison between utterances. To the extractor, comparison orders are more important than specific scores. In this paper, we propose a Ranker-Generator framework. It learns to rank the utterances by comparing them in pairs and learning from the global orders, then uses top utterances as the generator's input. We show that learning to rank utterances helps to select utterances related to the query effectively, and the summarizer can benefit from it. Experimental results on QMSum show that the proposed model outperforms all existing multi-stage models with fewer parameters.

Query-Utterance Attention with Joint modeling for Query-Focused Meeting Summarization

Query-focused meeting summarization (QFMS) aims to generate summaries from meeting transcripts in response to a given query. Previous works typically concatenate the query with meeting transcripts and implicitly model the query relevance only at the token level with attention mechanism. However, due to the dilution of key query-relevant information caused by long meeting transcripts, the original transformer-based model is insufficient to highlight the key parts related to the query. In this paper, we propose a query-aware framework with joint modeling token and utterance based on Query-Utterance Attention. It calculates the utterance-level relevance to the query with a dense retrieval module. Then both token-level query relevance and utterance-level query relevance are combined and incorporated into the generation process with attention mechanism explicitly. We show that the query relevance of different granularities contributes to generating a summary more related to the query. Experimental results on the QMSum dataset show that the proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art performance.