Quester: A Speech-based Question Answering Support System for Oral Presentations

Current slideware, such as PowerPoint, reinforces the delivery of linear oral presentations. In settings such as question answering sessions or review lectures, more extemporaneous and dynamic presentations are required. An intelligent system that can automatically identify and display the slides most related to the presenter’s speech, allows for more speaker flexibility in sequencing their presentation. We present Quester, a system that enables fast access to relevant presentation content during a question answering session and supports nonlinear presentations led by the speaker. Given the slides' contents and notes, the system ranks presentation slides based on semantic closeness to spoken utterances, displays the most related slides, and highlights the corresponding content keywords in slide notes. The design of our system was informed by findings from interviews with expert presenters and analysis of recordings of lectures and conference presentations. In a within-subjects study comparing our dynamic support system with a static slide navigation system during a question answering session, presenters expressed a strong preference for our system and answered the questions more efficiently using our system.