Detecting Action Items in Multi-party Meetings: Annotation and Initial Experiments

This paper presents the results of initial investigation and experiments into automatic action item detection from transcripts of multi-party human-human meetings. We start from the flat action item annotations of [1], and show that automatic classification performance is limited. We then describe a new hierarchical annotation schema based on the roles utterances play in the action item assignment process, and propose a corresponding approach to automatic detection that promises improved classification accuracy while also enabling the extraction of useful information for summarization and reporting.