  Summaries of meetings are very important as they convey the essential content
of discussions in a concise form. Generally, it is time consuming to read and
understand the whole documents. Therefore, summaries play an important role as
the readers are interested in only the important context of discussions. In
this work, we address the task of meeting document summarization. Automatic
summarization systems on meeting conversations developed so far have been
primarily extractive, resulting in unacceptable summaries that are hard to
read. The extracted utterances contain disfluencies that affect the quality of
the extractive summaries. To make summaries much more readable, we propose an
approach to generating abstractive summaries by fusing important content from
several utterances. We first separate meeting transcripts into various topic
segments, and then identify the important utterances in each segment using a
supervised learning approach. The important utterances are then combined
together to generate a one-sentence summary. In the text generation step, the
dependency parses of the utterances in each segment are combined together to
create a directed graph. The most informative and well-formed sub-graph
obtained by integer linear programming (ILP) is selected to generate a
one-sentence summary for each topic segment. The ILP formulation reduces
disfluencies by leveraging grammatical relations that are more prominent in
non-conversational style of text, and therefore generates summaries that is
comparable to human-written abstractive summaries. Experimental results show
that our method can generate more informative summaries than the baselines. In
addition, readability assessments by human judges as well as log-likelihood
estimates obtained from the dependency parser show that our generated summaries
are significantly readable and well-formed.
