SmartEDU: Accelerating Slide Deck Production with Natural Language Processing

Slide decks are a common medium for presenting a topic. To reduce the time required for their preparation, we present SmartEDU, a platform for drafting slides for a textual document, and the research that lead to its development. Drafts are Powerpoint files generated in three steps: pre-processing, for acquiring or discovering section titles; summarization, for compressing the contents of each section; slide composition, for organizing the summaries into slides. The resulting file may be further edited by the user. Several summarization methods were experimented in public datasets of presentations and in Wikipedia articles. Based on automatic evaluation measures and collected human opinions, we conclude that a Distillbart model is preferred to unsupervised summarization, especially when it comes to overall draft quality.