Report on the SIGDial 2021 special session on summarization of dialogues and multi-party meetings (SummDial)

Abstract

The SummDial special session on summarization of dialogues and multi-party meetings was held virtually within the SIGDial 2021 conference on July 29, 2021. SummDial @ SIGDial 2021 aimed to bring together the speech, dialogue, and summarization communities to foster cross-pollination of ideas and fuel the discussions/collaborations to attempt this crucial and timely problem. When the pandemic has restricted most of our in-person interactions, the current scenario has forced people to go virtual, resulting in an information overload from frequent dialogues and meetings in the virtual environment. Summarization could help reduce the cognitive burden on the participants; however, multi-party speech summarization comes with its own set of challenges. The SummDial special session aimed to leverage the community intelligence to find effective solutions while also brainstorming the future of AI interventions in meetings and dialogues. We report the findings of the special session in this article. We organized the SummDial special session under the aegis of the EU-funded H2020 European Live Translator (ELITR) project. 1 Date : 29 July, 2021. Website : https://elitr.github.io/automatic-minuting/summdial.html.