Abstractive meeting summarization by hierarchical adaptive segmental network learning with multiple revising steps

The Abstractive meeting summarization is a challenging problem in natural language understanding, which automatically generates the condensed summary covering the important points in the meeting conversation. However, the existing abstractive summarization works mainly focus on the structured text documents, which may be ineffectively applied to the meeting summarization task due to the lack of modeling the unstructured long-form conversational contents. In this paper, we consider the problem of abstractive meeting summarization from the viewpoint of hierarchical adaptive segmental encoder-decoder network learning. We propose the hierarchical neural encoder based on adaptive recurrent networks to learn the semantic representation of meeting conversation with adaptive conversation segmentation. We then devise a multi-step revising mechanism to refine the learned semantic representation. We finally develop the reinforced decoder network to generate the high-quality summaries for abstractive meeting summarization. We conduct the extensive experiments on the well-known AMI meeting conversation dataset to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.