A Framework for Automatic Reconstruction of a Semi-Structured Rationale from a Minutes Document

This paper discusses Tracker, a framework for meeting management. Many meeting support tools and groupware tools now implement the second generation DR protocols characterized by cheap capture and rich multimedia content. Managing such content requires the manual introduction of annotations to support efficient retrieval. However, to do this in a truly useful manner, the capture and management of these documents (decisions rationale) should encompass not only the annotation of the multimedia content for playback, but should support the extraction of relevant information at the level of semantics and pragmatics: i.e. they should be able to automatically extract information such as what subjects were discussed, what decisions were made, what tasks were assigned. We demonstrate how to achieve such an endeavor in this paper.