Long, often quite boring, notes of meetings

Meeting notes are documents which contain lots of structure. This structure is often implicit in layout and reserved words. On the other hand, since meetings tend to occur regularly and are repeated for long periods of time, this structure is often (semi-)formalized. This makes these documents suitable for automatic semantic annotation efforts. We describe the annotation we performed on the notes of more than 20 years of Dutch parliamentary debates. We annotated every word spoken in parliament with 1) the speaker, 2) her party at the time of speaking, 3) her role/function in parliament and 4) the iso-date. These annotations yield numerous new ways of searching, browsing, mining and summarizing these documents. Meetings are always too long, whence so are their verbatim notes. But of course they contain valuable information and notes have to be consulted from time to time. In this paper we show that semantic annotation can make finding things easier, and more fun