Re: Man-machine Dialogues Grounded in Public-sector Meeting Transcripts

Civic Technology Community Group,

Also, in addition to enabling citizens and journalists to be able to manually engage in man-machine dialogues about one or more public-sector meetings' transcripts, search-automation scenarios are possible. Users' natural-language queries, questions, and "dialogical procedures" could be stored and applied to public-sector meetings' minutes and transcripts data as they arrived. Users would, then, be able to receive alerts, e.g., by email, as updates pertinent to their stored searches occurred.

Mike Gifford: what is the nature and status of public-sector CMS tools, CKAN and DKAN tools, and extensions for these tools, with respect to meetings' minutes and transcripts?

Should city, county, state, and federal governments' and organizations' CMS tools ping search engines, for instance, when new minutes and transcripts are made available online and/or should these data be automatically routed to pertinent CKAN/DKAN data services?

The aforementioned Google Research MISeD data (https://github.com/google-research-datasets/MISeD) appears to utilize a JSONL-based data format for representing 225 meetings across three domains: 134 Product Meetings (AMI), 58 Academic Meetings (ICSI), and 33 public Parliamentary Committee Meetings sourced from the Welsh Parliament and the Parliament of Canada.

Would a new format or standard for meetings' minutes and transcripts be useful, e.g., MeetingsML, something expanding upon markdown, or something expanding upon timed text (perhaps enabling streaming minutes and transcripts for meetings)?

Thank you. Any thoughts on these or any other, related topics?


Best regards,
Adam

P.S.:

[1] https://www.congress.gov/house-hearing-transcripts/118th-congress
[2] https://www.congress.gov/senate-hearing-transcripts/118th-congress

________________________________
From: Adam Sobieski <adamsobieski@hotmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 26, 2024 2:40 PM
To: public-civics@w3.org <public-civics@w3.org>
Subject: Man-machine Dialogues Grounded in Public-sector Meeting Transcripts

Civic Technology Community Group,

Hello. I'd like to share a hyperlink to some exciting AI R&D:

https://research.google/blog/efficient-data-generation-for-source-grounded-information-seeking-dialogs-a-use-case-for-meeting-transcripts/

"Meeting recordings have helped people worldwide catch missed meetings, focus instead of taking notes during calls, and review information. But recordings can also take a lot of time to review. One solution to enable efficient navigation of recordings would be an agent that supports natural language conversations with meeting recordings, so that users can catch up on meetings they have missed. This could manifest as a source-grounded information-seeking dialog task where the agent would allow users to efficiently navigate the given knowledge source and extract information of interest. In this conversational setting, a user would interact with an agent over multiple rounds of queries and responses regarding a source text. The input to the agent model would include the source text, dialog history, and the current user query, and its output should be a response to the query and a set of attributions (text spans from the source document that support the response)."

These technologies will benefit society across sectors – meetings are ubiquitous – and will have civic-technology applications.

In the not-too-distant future, citizens and journalists will be able to ask questions and to engage in dialogues about public-sector meetings, both individual meetings and collections of such meetings.


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski