Natural language queries on natural language data: A database of meeting dialogues

Abstract

This paper describes an integrated system that enables the storage and retrieval of meeting transcripts (e.g. staff meetings). The system gives users who have not attended a meeting, or who want to review a particular point, enhanced access to an annotated version of the recorded data. This paper describes the various stages in the processing, storage and query of the data. First, we put forward the idea of shallow dialogue processing, in order to extract significant features of the meeting transcriptions for storage in a database, whose structure is briefly outlined. Low-level access to the database is provided as a Web service, which can be connected to several interfaces. A description of how multimodal input can be used with VoiceXML is also provided, thus offering an easy solution for voice and web based access to the dialogue data. The paper ends with considerations about the available data and its use in the current version of the system.