Query types in the meeting domain: assessing the role of argumentative structure in answering questions on meeting discussion records

We define a new task of question answering on meeting records and assess its difficulty in terms of types of information and retrieval techniques required. The importance of this task is revealed by the increasingly growing interest in the design of sophisticated interfaces for accessing meeting records such as meeting browsers. We ground our work on the empirical analysis of elicited user queries. We assess what is the type of information sought by the users and perform a user query classification along several semantic dimensions of the meeting content. We found that queries about argumentative processes and outcomes represent the majority among the elicited queries (about 60%). We also assess the difficulty in answering the queries and focus on the requirements of a prospective QA system to successfully deal with them. Our results suggest that standard Information Retrieval and Question Answering alone can only account for less than 20% of the queries and need to be completed with additional type of information and inference.