Abstract
While social demands for consensus development through public involvement are uprising in social decision-making, electronic discussion has come to play a particular role in consensus development along with rapid propagation of the internet. Methods of topic extraction and automated summarization from public discussion records have been proposed in this work so that participants' mutual understanding on progress of discussion and dominant trends of opinions can be promoted. In addition, we developed an electronic discussion system called TSS (Transcript Summarization System), which is equipped with these supporting functions, and then tested the functionality of the system using some actual meeting records.
