Volume 12, Number 09, May 2022

Comparing Methods for Extractive Summarisation of Call Centre Dialogue

  Authors

Alexandra N. Uma and Dmitry Sityaev, Connex One, United Kingdom

  Abstract

This paper provides results of evaluating some text summarisation techniques for the purpose of producing call summaries for contact centre solutions. We specifically focus on extractive summarisation methods, as they do not require any labelled data and are fairly quick and easy to implement for production use. We experimentally compare several such methods by using them to produce summaries of calls, and evaluating these summaries objectively (using ROUGE-L) and subjectively (by aggregating the judgements of several annotators). We found that TopicSum and Lead-N outperform the other summarisation methods, whilst BERTSum received comparatively lower scores in both subjective and objective evaluations. The results demonstrate that even such simple heuristics-based methods like Lead-N can produce meaningful and useful summaries of call centre dialogues.

  Keywords

Information Retrieval, Text Summarisation, Extractive Summarisation, Call Centre Dialogues.