Compare Manual and Automatic Idea Consolidation
After generating comments in a meeting, they need to be organized into categories.
There are three ways to do this manually:
1. All group members organize all comments. Much user control, but terrible recall and
precision.
2. Each group member organizes a subset of comments. Less user control, greater
recall and precision.
3. Staff member(s) organizes all comments. No user control, high recall and precision.
In the manual approach, recall and precision may be about 80% and it may last 90 minutes.
The automatic approach provides no user control (although group members may adjust the
categories later), but provides 100% recall and precision and takes less than 5% of the
time. The automatic technique 1) parses comments by eliminating function words, 2) stems
content words, and 3) uses cluster analysis to group comments based upon the number of
similar keywords.