VCSUM : A Versatile C hinese Meeting Summarization Dataset (2023)

Abstract: Compared to news and chat summarization, the development of meeting summarization is hugely decelerated by the limited data. To this end, we introduce a versatile Chinese meeting summarization dataset, dubbed VCSum, consisting of 239 real-life meetings, with a total duration of over 230 hours. We claim our dataset is versatile because we provide the annotations of topic segmentation, headlines, segmentation summaries, overall meeting summaries, and salient sentences for each meeting transcript. As such, the dataset can adapt to various summarization tasks or methods, including segmentation-based summarization, multi-granularity summarization and retrieval-then-generate summarization. Our analysis confirms the effectiveness and robustness of VCSum. We also provide a set of benchmark models regarding different downstream summarization tasks on VCSum to facilitate further research.

## introduction meeting summarization @xcite @xcite is the task of distilling the meeting transcript into a concise and readable summary that contains the most salient parts of a meeting. the summary can help the participants or absentees to quickly grape the highlight points. therefore, a set of models have been proposed to comprehensively and succinctly summarize the content of a meeting @xcite @xcite . compared to standard text summarization @xcite , meeting summarization is a much more challenging task because it has more informal and oral expressions, topic shifts, multiple participants and longer context. for this reason, existing datasets for meeting † equal contribution. ## task overview based on the annotation of our dataset, we propose three main challenging tasks. given a meeting transcript @xmath0, u 2 , ..., u n } consisting of n utterances, wherein each utterance highlight sentence extraction the task of highlight sentence extraction (hse) aims to find a set of spans @xmath1, w i k )|0 < @xmath2, 0 < @xmath3. all highlight sentences are not overlapped and not across different utterances. ## experiments to jointly accommodate the segmentation-based summarization and overall meeting summarization, we divide the train/dev/test datasets that contain around 80%/10%/10% segmentation summaries as well as overall summaries. there are totally 193/25/21 overall summaries and 1076/135/136 segmentation summaries in train/dev/test sets. ## conclusion and future work in this work, we collect a large and high-quality chinese meeting summarization dataset from reallife videos, namely vcsum. the dataset is versatile to support the tasks of highlight sentence extraction, segmentation-based summarization, multigranularity summarization and meeting summarization. depth analyses demonstrate the superiority of our dataset. we then provide a strong benchmark for different downstream tasks on vcsum. for future work, we believe the development of an endto-end framework that could jointly solve all tasks of vcsum is a promising direction. furthermore, we will also consider to release the video and audio files of the annotated meetings to facilitate the research of multi-modality meeting summarization.