Action Item Friendly Phrases

To aid in action item detection, the following types of example phrases may help to get your action item recognized by our detector.

General Patterns

• The most important thing is that detection will be more likely if action item discussion ends in some explicit form of agreement. The people concerned, or other members of the meeting, should explicitly signal their acceptance of or agreement to the task. This will involve saying things like, "okay", "sounds good", "i'll do that", "yeah," "right," "exactly," etc. This aspect of agreement is also very important to effective action item detection.

• Some patterns are particularly likely to allow the owner or responsible party to be detected:
  • "i'm going to [do X]"
  • "if you could [do X]"
  • "what i'd like you/NAME to do is [X]"
  • "i/we/you/NAME need to [do X]"
  • "i/we/you/NAME can/should [do X]"
  • "let's [do X]"
  • "so i/we'll [do X]"

• Some patterns are particularly likely to allow the timescale or deadline to be detected:
  • "at the start of [week/month/etc]"
  • "by the end of [week/month/etc]"
  • "by the next [meeting/etc]"
  • "by next [day/week/month/etc]"
  • "in the next [N] [day/week/month/etc]"
  • any mention of "day/week/meeting"

• And combining all of these together is even better!
  • "okay sounds good so i'll do X by the start of week two"
• But this doesn't have to be in one utterance, or all spoken by one person:
  • "so john if you could do X"
  • "okay when"
  • "by the start of week two"
  • "sounds good to me"

Practical Examples

These are actual instances of detected action items that were taken from the training data:

• "so what i'm going to suggest is that each of you go out and let's plan to meet at the start of week two"

• "at the start of week two Jack if you could come in with a /uh/ a proposed /um/ /uh/ set of equipment to buy"

• "alright so /um/ let's put that one on the list as well and we'll be looking for your recommendations"

• "alright so what i'd like you to do is in the next couple of days coordinate this aspect of it and fold that into your recommendation when we meet again at the start of week two"

• "you need to go back and /uh/ if you can get in contact with your boss"

• "so Jack /uh/ for i'd like you to have one more meeting on /um/ /uh/ in in a couple days about /uh/ the start of week three just to reconfirm everything and at that time Jack i'd like you to come back to me with the the details on the printer and server"

• "we should have individual phone drops for each of them"

• "we'll put all that into their office for them. it'll take us a couple of extra days because the office won't be available until right about the time that joe_browning gets here but"

• "we'll try to find one on the same floor but i don't know if we can find one on the same wing"

• "if we choose to use atlas -- which maybe we should just do -- we should just throw this out before we invest a lot of time in it"

• "so I'll - I'll take a closer look at it"

• "maybe you should actually look at it yourself too to get a sense of what it is you'll - you'll be dealing with"

• "um so maybe if you guys can look at it and sort of see what"

• "so, i guess, yeah, if - if you and don can - if you can show him the p_file stuff and see."

• "if you tell me what you mean i can write a program to do it"

• "we'll meet next tuesday, i guess"

• "ok, then. let's meet - meet again next tuesday"

• "you're just gonna have to explain it to me, then, on tuesday, how it's all gonna work out"

• "we need to find out how much that will cost so i can pass that on to morgan"

• "we'll move on to the mississippi state and if it doesn't look like that's going to work, we'll look at something else"

• "so if over the next couple of days you find yourself wondering what we talked about in the meeting, write down the sort of query you'd like to make."

• "well i think the answer is we need to record as many as we can. right? i don't see any reason not to try to record a meeting or two a week."

• "i wanna start by in the next couple weeks just doing the speech group"

-- PatrickEhlen - 23 Aug 2006