Tutorial - Text Summarization.PPT

MA3 - Text summarization Dragomir R. Radev CLAIR: Computational Linguistics And Information Retrieval group University of Michigan radev@ Information overload The problem: 4 Billion URLs indexed by Google 200 TB of data on the Web [Lyman and Varian 03] Possible approaches: information retrieval document clustering information extraction visualization question answering text summarization Types of summaries Purpose Indicative, informative, and critical summaries Form Extracts (representative paragraphs/sentences/phrases) Abstracts: “a concise summary of the central subject matter of a document” [Paice90]. Dimensions Single-document vs. multi-document Context Query-specific vs. query-independent Genres headlines outlines minutes biographies abridgments sound bites movie summaries chronologies, etc. What does summarization involve? Three stages (typically) content identification conceptual organization realization Outline Human summarization and abstracting What professional abstractors do Ashworth: “To take an original article, understand it and pack it neatly into a nutshell without loss of substance or clarity presents a challenge which many have felt worth taking up for the joys of achievement alone. These are the characteristics of an art form”. Borko and Bernier 75 The abstract and its use: Abstracts promote current awareness Abstracts save reading time Abstracts facilitate selection Abstracts facilitate literature searches Abstracts improve indexing efficiency Abstracts aid in the preparation of reviews Cremmins 82, 96 American National Standard for Writing Abstracts: State the purpose, methods, results, and conclusions presented in the original document, either in that order or with an initial emphasis on results and conclusions. Make the abstract as informative as the nature of the document will permit, so that readers may decide, quickly and accurately, whether they need to read the entire document. Avoid including background information or citing the