SIGdial 2015

16th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

Call Centre Conversation Summarization: A Pilot Task at Multiling 2015

Benoit Favre, Evgeny Stepanov, Jeremy Trione, Frederic Bechet and Giuseppe Riccardi
This paper describes the results of the Call Centre Conversation Summarization task at Multiling’15. The CCCS task consists in generating abstractive synopses from call centre conversations between a caller and an agent. Synopses are summaries of the problem of the caller, and how it is solved by the agent. Generating them is a very challenging task given that deep analysis of the dialogs and text generation are necessary. Three languages were addressed: French, Italian and English translations of conversations from those two languages. The official evaluation metric was ROUGE-2. Two participants submitted a total of four systems which had trouble beating the extractive baselines. The datasets released for the task will allow more research on abstractive dialog summarization.