Text Summarization

Background
Text summarization (TS) is the process of identifying the most salient information in a
document or set of related documents and conveying it in less space (typically by a factor
of five to ten) than the original text. In principle, TS is possible because of the naturally
occurring redundancy in text and because important (salient) information is spread
unevenly in textual documents. Identifying the redundancy is a challenge that hasnt been
fully resolved yet.
There is no single definition for salience and redundancy given that different users of
summaries may have different bacgrounds, tass, and preferences. Salience also
depends on the structure of the source documents. Since information that the user already
no!s should not be included in a summary and at the same time information that is
salient for one user may not be for another, it is very difficult to achieve consistent
"udgments about summary #uality from human "udges. This fact has made it difficult to
evaluate (and hence, improve) automatic summarization.
Taxonomically one can distinguish among the follo!ing types of summaries$
extractive%non&extractive, generic%#uery&based, single&document%multi&document, and
monolingual%multilingual%crosslingual. 'ost existing summarizers !or in an extractive
fashion, selecting portions of the input documents (e.g., sentences) that are believed to be
more salient. (on&extractive summarization includes dynamic reformulation of the
extracted content, involving a deeper understanding of the input text, and is therefore
limited to small domains. )uery&based summaries are produced in reference to a user
#uery (e.g., summarize a document about an international summit focusing only on the
issues related to the environment) !hile generic summaries attempt to identify salient
information in text !ithout the context of a #uery. The difference bet!een single& and
multi&document summarization (S*S and '*S) is #uite obvious, ho!ever some of the
types of problems that occur in '*S are #ualitatively different from the ones observed in
S*S$ e.g., addressing redundancy across information sources and dealing !ith
contradictory and complementary information. (o true multilingual summarization
systems exist yet, ho!ever, cross&lingual approaches have been applied successfully.
+ number of evaluation techni#ues for summarization have been developed. They are
typically classified into t!o categories. Intrinsic measures attempt to #uantify the
similarity of a summary !ith one or more model summaries produced by humans.
Intrinsic measures include ,recision, -ecall, Sentence .verlap, /appa, and -elative
0tility. +ll of these metrics assume that summaries have been produced in an extractive
fashion. 1xtrinsic measures include using the summaries for a tas, e.g., document
retrieval, #uestion ans!ering, or text classification.
Traditionally, summarization has been mostly applied to t!o genres of text$ scientific
papers and ne!s stories. These genres are distinguished by a high level of stereotypical
structure. In both these domains, simply choosing the first fe! sentences of a text or
texts provides a baseline that fe! systems can better and none can better by much.
+ttempts to summarize other texts, e.g., fiction or email, have been some!hat less
successful.
-ecently, summarization researchers have also investigated methods of text
simplification (or compression). Typically, these methods apply to a single sentence at a
time. Simple methods include dropping unimportant !ords (determiners, adverbs).
2omplex methods involve reorganizing the syntactic parse tree of the sentence to remove
sections or to rephrase units in shorter form. 3anguage modeling approaches in TS have
mostly focused on this method.
'otivation for future research in TS in an Information -etrieval frame!or
Text Summarization is an active field of research in both the I- and (3, communities.
Summarization is important for I- since it is a means to provide access to large
repositories of data in an efficient !ay. It shares some basic techni#ues !ith indexing,
since both indexing and summarization are concerned !ith identifying the essence of a
document. 4igh #uality summarization re#uires sophisticated (3, techni#ues in
addition, !hich are normally not studied in I-. In particular, for domains in !hich the
aspects of interest can be pre&specified, summarization loos very much lie Information
extraction. Summarization is therefore a good challenge problem to bring together
techni#ues from different areas.
In comparison !ith I-, the field of summarization suffers from the difficulty of defining
a !ell&specified and manageable tas. Since truly reusable resources lie the T-12 test
collections did not exist for summarization, it !as hard to measure progress. Importantly,
the high amount of variance across human summaries complicates evaluations. Improved,
more tightly specified tass are currently being developed !ithin the *02 program.
3ist of 5&6 year challenges
*efine clearly specified summarization tas(s) in an I- setting. 1xamples$
headline&length summarization, topic&based summarization.
'ove to a ne! genre, since producing text summaries is almost trivial for
ne!s!ire and ne!spaper documents.
'ove beyond extractive summarization. 1xtractive summaries are clearly sub
optimal !ith respect to obtainable compression rate and overall coherence.
Integrate the users prior no!ledge into models. 0sers do not !ant in summaries
material they no! already.
(eeds to tacle the problem
Improved models that capture a users bacground no!ledge
3arge data sets !ith example summaries (preferably outside ne!s domain) 7 e.g.,
the creation of a Summ8an (similar to the one created at the 940 summer
!orshop in :;;< (-adev et al.), but significantly larger). Ideally the Summ8an
!ould contain summaries of the same texts created from different perspectives, at
different compressions (from 5;= do!n to headline only), and in different styles
(fluent, telegraphic, bullet points, etc.).
1valuation
+ ey point to move for!ard is the specification of a clear tas and evaluation metric.
Inspiration can perhaps be found by using 8310 lie metrics, !hich could replace part
of the current evaluation practice, !hich is costly and error prone because it is entirely
manual. 8310 style evaluation has been successfully applied for headline generation
(Sch!artz et al.) and methods to tune it are being investigated (3in and 4ovy).
Sample tass that have been suggested include$
*02$ #uery biased, vie!point, ne!s clustering (T*T clusters)
*ocument exploration$ bro!sing tool to help find relevant passages
(e!s updates (!hat>s ne! today)
3anguage 'odeling$ successes and hopes
3anguage 'odeling has successfully been applied for content selection (2onroy, /raai"),
compression of sentences (/night and 'arcu) and documents (*aum? and 'arcu),
generation of headlines (Sch!artz et al.) and reverse&engineering the cut @ paste process
applied by human summarizers (9ing and 'c/eo!n). Since it is highly unliely that
summarization can do !ithout modeling higher order structure, integrating linguistic
intuitions into probabilistic models poses a particular challenge. +lso the scalability of
increasingly complex models is an important issue for !oring systems providing on&line
summarization.
Arand challenge
The purposeful summary$ summarize content from a number of textual and semi
structured sources, including databases and !ebpages, in the right !ay (language, format,
size, time) for a specific user, given a tas and the user profile.
,ointers
http$%%duc.nist.gov%
http$%%!!!.summarization.com
http$%%!!!.clsp."hu.edu%!s:;;<%groups%asmd%