Automatic Question-Answer Alignment for Japanese Diverse Local Assembly Minutes

EasyChair Preprint 15165

Abstract

In the question-and-answer sessions in Japanese local assembly minutes, various topics about local administration are discussed, from which residents can learn about the administrative policy. However, in the discussion in some councils, a single council member asks several questions in a batch, then a prefectural governor and persons in charge answer their corresponding questions one by one. This kind of argument structure is difficult for residents to read since the text of the question and that of the answer are separated from each other. This study aims to improve the readability of the minutes and make local politics more easily accessible to residents. In order to achieve that goal, this work proposes to transform them into "one question, one answer" format through two stage processes, text segmentation and Question and Answer alignment. We employ several robust segmentation methods for the segmentation so that the proposed method can be applied to various discussion styles of Japanese local assembly minutes. Our experimental evaluation showed that the proposed methods performed well on not only the specific minutes but also those other than the minutes used for extracting the training data of our methods.

Keyphrases: Segmentation, alignment, local assembly minutes

@booklet{EasyChair:15165,
  author    = {Yoshiki Higashiyama and Tomoyosi Akiba},
  title     = {Automatic Question-Answer Alignment for Japanese Diverse Local Assembly Minutes},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 15165},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2024}}