Description of the system

In order to better understand the nature of the experiments described further on in this work, and to situate the context of this research in a more specific framework, we present here a detailed explanation of the Archivus interface and its various functionalities.

4.5.1 What can be done

The Archivus system can be thought of as a virtual librarian that helps users find information that is contained in meetings that have been recorded in specially equipped meeting rooms. Meetings that take place in these rooms are recorded in video and audio form, and are later transcribed so that a text form of the entire meeting also exists. This text is also analyzed and annotated with information such as who was speaking, the topics that were discussed, the parts of the meeting in which decisions were made, etc.

The major tasks that the user can perform using Archivus are:

• find meetings, parts of a meeting, or specific information in a meeting based on criteria such as 1) the date, location or participants in a meeting, 2) the topics covered, keywords spoken, or documents used or referred to in a meeting, or 3) the dialogue acts (i.e. questions, statements, etc.) or argumentative sections (discussions, arguments, etc.) in a meeting

• get an overview of all meetings in the database that are relevant to a user’s goals

• browse quickly and easily through only the meetings or meeting sections that are relevant to the user’s goals

• view and browse through documents from a meeting

• watch video, listen to audio or read the text transcript of a meeting

• browse through any meeting without specifying search criteria

• customize the organization of the entire database of meetings based on one or two criteria, for example by date and speaker

Additionally, the Archivus system has been designed to be conversational, which means that when it can, the system will try to help the user determine which information is needed so that Archivus can find the information that the user is looking for.

4.5.2 How it can be done

In his section, we explain the graphical components of the Archivus system and the types of functionalities that they give access to. Figure 1 shows the Archivus interface as it appears after the search criteria ‘Which article did Susan suggest at the meeting in Geneva?’ have been specified. The various parts of the interface are explained in more detail below.

Figure 1: The Archivus interface

The bookcase

Each meeting in the Archivus system is represented as a book, and the bookcase, located in the upper left corner of the screen, contains all of the meetings that are available in the system. Books can be sorted in order to help the user browse them more easily. This can be done by changing the labels on the bookcase, a function accessible by clicking on the buttons that appear towards the bottom of the bookcase.

There are two such buttons - one for specifying the label for the legs of the bookcase,

and another for the shelves. By default, no labels appear when the system is first started. If the books are spread across more than one bookcase, arrows will appear near the top and bottom of the bookcase which can be used to move between the bookcases. If the user has specified some search criteria, the books change colour – some become light green and others dark green. The light green books (called ‘active’

books) are those that contain information that matches the search criteria. The dark green books (called ‘inactive’ books) are those that do not contain any information relevant to the search.

System prompt and query input areas

A text version of the audio prompt appears in this area, for cases where the user has turned off the output sound, or wants to have a visual reminder of the last thing that the system said to them. Just below the system prompt area is the query input field, in which users specify their typed queries. Moreover, the user can turn off voice input to the system by selecting the microphone icon to the left of the query input bar. The icon appears with a red cross over it when voice input has been turned off.

Interactive browsing area

The interactive browsing area is the central pane of the system, and can contain different items depending on what the user is currently doing with the system. Most commonly, it displays selection options resulting from the activation of a criteria selection button, or a book that has been opened.

The book (Figure 2) has several components that help the user browse the meeting and see the results of their search. The main part of the book shows the content of the meeting. The name of the person who spoke a particular phrase appears in the margin, and what they said appears in the main body of the page next to their name. The section of the page that is relevant to the search criteria specified is highlighted in yellow.

The hit tabs shown in yellow indicate the pages where Archivus found results that meet the search criteria that have been provided. The up and down arrows above and below the tabs can be used to move between them, but the tabs themselves are not clickable. The currently visible hit tab is a darker yellow.

The content tabs take the user to various salient sections of the book. The cover tab gives access to the cover page, which contains information such as the date of the meeting and the participants. The content tab takes the user to the table of contents,

i.e. the topics of the meeting. The documents tab takes them to a list of all of the documents that were used and/or discussed during the meeting. The tab that has been selected will be a slightly darker colour than the others.

Figure 2: The Archivus book

Multimedia such as audio and video can be accessed directly from the book by selecting either the icon to play the video or the icon to play the audio. The media will appear in a media player in the middle left side of the screen and can be controlled using the standard video-type control buttons that appear in the player. Selecting the stop button will close the media player. Moreover, the media player is tuned to start the media at the page from which it was selected, giving users easy and quick access to very specific points in the meeting.

The user can also browse through the book by paging through it using the arrows located on the bottom outside page corners. The book can be closed by selecting the close tab, or will close automatically when criteria that don’t match it are specified.

Interactive history

The interactive history helps users keep track of the search criteria that they have specified during a particular interaction. These can either be viewed by scrolling (if there are many), or removed from the list, which redefines the search.

Criteria refinement buttons

The criteria refinement buttons serve as shortcuts to various categories of information that user requirements studies have shown to be useful for meeting browsing and retrieval, such as specifying the location of a meeting , the date on which it was held

, or the participants of that meeting . The content button provides direct access to content related information such as topics, keywords or documents while the dialogue elements button , provides access to more detailed linguistic annotations on the data such as dialogue acts and argumentative segmentation.

System buttons

The system buttons provide general control over the system such as access to help, repeating a prompt that the system has just played, resetting the system (which effectively clears all search criteria), and the task finished button which was added solely for the purpose of the experiments described in further sections of this thesis.

Finally it is important to note that following the suggestions of Sutcliffe [58] regarding the design of multimedia interfaces and how to influence what users look at, several features have been added to the interface whose intention is to draw the user’s attention to areas of the book that have changed or that the system feels are directly relevant to the user, such as relevant books briefly moving in the bookshelf, or green-blue boxes appearing as borders around the areas of the interface that are directly important for the user’s current search.

4.6 Conclusions

In this chapter we presented the Archivus system. We began with a discussion of potential users and their requirements, and the data that was available for the Archivus backend database. We then went on to discuss the motivations and reasoning behind the design choices that were made, finishing with an overview of the possible tasks for which Archivus can be used, and a detailed description of the system itself. In the next chapter, we discuss the user-driven experiments that were performed using Archivus.