The Necessity of a Meeting Recording and Playback System, and the Benefit of Topic–Level Annotations to Meeting Browsing

Much work in the area of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has targeted the problem of supporting meetings between collaborators who are non-collocated, enabling meetings to transcend boundaries of space. In this paper, we explore the beginnings of a proposed solution for allowing meetings to transcend time as well. The need for such a solution is motivated by a user survey in which busy professionals are questioned about meetings they have either missed or forgotten the important details about after the fact. Our proposed solution allows these professionals to transcend time in a sense by revisiting a recorded meeting that has been structured for quick retrieval of sought information. Such a solution supports complete recovery of prior discussions, allowing needed information to be retrieved quickly, and thus potentially facilitating the effective continuation of discussions from the past. We evaluate the proposed solution with a formal user study in which we measure the impact of the proposed structural annotations on retrieval of information. The results of the study show that participants took significantly less time to retrieve the answers when they had access to discourse structure based annotation than in a control condition in which they had access only to unannotated video recordings (p < 0.01, effect size 0.94 standard deviations).