A COMPUTER-SUPPORTED SYSTEM OF MEETINGS USING A MODEL OF INTERPERSONAL-COMMUNICATION

Information systems to support cooperative work among people should be first designed to help human communication. However, there are few sy stems based on the analysis of human communication. Standing on this s ituation, we propose a meeting support system for the participants' un derstandings by indicating the suitable information about the ''topic of the scene''. Our system provides only useful information by monitor ing each statement without complex methods. To show something useful m ulti-media information for members, we propose the following structure of the meeting on the basis of the analysis of communication. Each st atement is classified into two levels, either; a statement about the ' 'progress'' of the meeting (context-lever utterances) or, a statement about ''objects'' (content-level utterances). Further, content-level u tterances are classified into two types, position utterances and argum ent utterances. Using this classification of statements, the proceedin g of the meeting is represented as the tree model which is called a '' context-tree'' If the structure of meetings is fixed, it is possible t o select only useful information from all shared information for membe rs by analyzing each content-level utterance. The system introduced in this paper shows appropriate multi-media information about the ''topi c of the scene'' by using the above model. We have implemented a proto type system based on the above ideas. Moreover, we have made some expe riments to show the effectiveness of this system. Those results show t hat our method is effective to improve the ''productivity'' of meeting s.