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the annotation of the dialogue structure. We consider
two types of meeting ontologies:
1. A meeting-type-specific ontology can be used to
represent the information related to the purpose
and nature of the meeting, regardless of the
technical domain in which the meeting takes
place.
2. Domain-specific ontologies complement the
task-related information with structured
knowledge about the domain in which the
dialogue is taking place.
These ontologies must be somehow formalized
and built in a flexible and efficient manner. For both
types of ontologies, their (semi)automatic
production must be also accompanied by
mechanisms that automatically attach the proper
ontologies to the meetings. The attachment will be
obtained by dialogue model detection and the
classification of the different tasks (reporting,
decision making, vote, etc.) that can be observed
during meetings and characterized by specific
interaction patterns. For instance, meeting events
are often introduced by summaries, recaps,
conclusions, sign-offs (i.e. agreements),
disagreements, rejections, etc.
A first rough classification of meeting types has
been considered, where three main classes were
decided upon:
1. Meetings for Executive Strategies. These types of
meetings are aimed at goal formation and are
typically unconstrained. Examples are Board
meetings, Steering committee meetings.
2. Management meetings are aimed at plan
formation for task management (e.g. human
resources and task allocation). They are
generally along the lines of project and staff
meetings and are more structured.
3. Business Processes Meetings are more
structured, disciplined, and often have an
invariant structure (i.e. follow templates). They
are aimed at plan execution (i.e. control).
All the above types of meetings might be part of
another class of meetings characterized by two
essential features: decision making and action point
events. We refer to this class as breakdown
meetings. Action points can be defined as task
assignment with deliverables and delay.
2.5 Argumentative structure of
meetings
In order to answer the types of questions
exemplified in the previous section, we need to
structure the meeting records at a deeper level, by
further annotating them with appropriate meta-
descriptions: "argumentative structures". A simple
but expressive model of an argumentative structure
is the "Issue Based Information Systems" (IBIS)
model, proposed by (Kunz and Rittel, 1970) and
adopted as a foundational theory in some computer-
supported collaborative argumentation (CSCA)
systems such as Zeno (Gordon and Karacapilidis,
1999), HERMES (Karacapilidis and Papadias,
2001), Questmap (Conklin et al., 2001), and
Compendium (Selvin, 2001). We adopt this model
as the reference model for the description of the
argumentative structure of decision-making events
in meetings. The model captures and highlights the
essential lines of a discussion in terms of what issues
have been discussed and what alternatives have been
proposed and accepted by the participants.
2.6 The Meeting Description Schema
The description schema we propose, discussed in
(Ghorbel et al., 2003), is the starting point for the
construction of general meeting model. It is
formalised using XML-schema
3
and reflects the
substantial aspects of the IBIS model. The Meeting
Description Schema (MDS) is based on the previous
observation that there exist a number of sequencing
regularities in dialogue, adjacency pairs, describing
facts such as, for instance, that questions are
generally followed by answers, issues by solutions,
proposals by acceptances or rejections, etc. In MDS,
the dialogue contexts are represented by
argumentative episodes and can be viewed as snap-
shots of the discussion. When analysing the
dialogue, a single tree structure is not sufficient to
represent the adjacency pairs: consider an answer
that refers to two questions in the discussion. For
this purpose we add a dependency relation
("replies_to"), which links the answer to both the
two questions. The "replies_to" relation induces a
chain structure on the dialogue which is local to
each episode and which enables the visualization of
its context. There is an invariant parametric structure
of discussion episodes which is reported below:
DISCUSS(issue)
PROPOSE(solution/idea/alternative/opinion)
ASK_FOR(explanation/justification)
PROVIDE(explanation/justification)
ACCEPT(explanation/justification)
REJECT(explanation/justification)
ACCEPT(solution/idea/alternative/opinion)
REJECT(solution/idea/alternative/opinion)
3
http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema/
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