Abstract
Meeting analysis has a long theoretical tradition in social psychology, with established practical ramifications in computer science, especially in computer supported cooperative work. More recently, a good deal of research has focused on the issues of indexing and browsing multimedia records of meetings. Most research in this area, however, is still based on data collected in laboratories, under somewhat artificial conditions. This article presents an analysis of the discourse structure and spontaneous interactions at real-life multidisciplinary medical team meetings held as part of the work routine in a major hospital. It is hypothesized that the conversational structure of these meetings, as indicated by sequencing and duration of vocalizations, enables segmentation into individual patient case discussions. The task of segmenting audio-visual records of multidisciplinary medical team meetings is described as a topic segmentation task, and a method for automatic segmentation is proposed. An empirical evaluation based on hand labelled data is presented, which determines the optimal length of vocalization sequences for segmentation, and establishes the competitiveness of the method with approaches based on more complex knowledge sources. The effectiveness of Bayesian classification as a segmentation method, and its applicability to meeting segmentation in other domains are discussed.
Highlights
Group dialogue at meetings has been a topic of systematic study from quantitative and qualitative perspectives since at least the 50’s, with the works of Bales [1950] and others
The apparently good performance of the single-feature context in terms of WD is explained by the low average number of PCD boundaries it predicts per segment in conjunction with the fact that the WD metric tends to favour under-prediction
This paper described a small but, we believe, representative corpus of speech interaction data generated during multidisciplinary medical team meetings4
Summary
Group dialogue at meetings has been a topic of systematic study from quantitative and qualitative perspectives since at least the 50’s, with the works of Bales [1950] and others. Advances in computer technology have stimulated research on similar topics in the computer science disciplines of human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW). This includes studies of video-mediated meetings [Olson et al 1993; ACM Transactions on Information Systems, Vol 30, No 3, Article 19, Publication date: June 2012. In an MDTM, health professionals of different specialities meet to discuss diagnosis, treatment options and patient management. These meetings serve educational purposes (training of students and junior doctors) and broader healthcare management and organisational functions [Kane 2008]. Support for collaboration at MDTMs is a topic that has attracted the interest of the CSCW community lately, and detailed analyses of organisational processes surrounding the meeting, its different functions in the hospital environment, and mechanisms that add dependability to their decision making have been conducted [Robertson et al 2010; Groth et al 2009; Kane and Luz 2006]
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