An Ontology-based Visual Interface for Browsing and Summarizing Conversations

In this paper we present a visual interactive interface to create focused summaries of human conversations via mapping to the concepts within an ontology. The ontology includes nodes for the conversation participants, for Dialog Act (DA) properties such as decision, action-item or subjectivity, as well as for entities mentioned in the conversation. The classifiers used to annotate conversation data with DA property and entity tags can be applied to any conversational modality including face to face meetings, emails, blogs and chats. Our interface allows the user to explore these conversations and identify informative sentences by their association with nodes of interest on the tree-structured visual representation of the ontology. The sentences thus selected by the user as potentially important components of the summary can then be used to derive a brief and focused overview of the conversation. The display interface and data parsing components in the initial prototype were all developed based on Java frameworks and toolkits.