A Support System for Revising Titles to Stimulate the Lay Reader’s Interest in Technical Achievements

A Support System for Revising Titles to Stimulate the Lay Reader’s Interest in Technical Achievements Yasuko Senda†‡, Yasusi Sinohara†, and Manabu Okumura§ †System Engineering Research Laboratory, Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, Tokyo Japan ‡Department of Computational Intelligence and Systems Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo Japan §Precision and Intelligence Laboratory, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo Japan Abstract When we write a report or an explanation on a newly-developed technology for readers including laypersons, it is very important to compose a title that can stimulate their in- terest in the technology. However, it is dif- ficult for inexperienced authors to come up with an appealing title. In this research, we developed a support sys- tem for revising titles. We call it “title revi- sion wizard”. The wizard provides a guid- ance on revising draft title to compose a title meeting three key points, and support tools for coming up with and elaborating on com- prehensible or appealing phrases. In order to test the effect of our title revision wizard, we conducted a questionnaire sur- vey on the effect of the titles with or with- out using the wizard on the interest of lay readers. The survey showed that the wiz- ard is effective and helpful for the authors who cannot compose appealing titles for lay readers by themselves. 1 Introduction When we read a document, we usually read its title first, and then we read the body text only if the title catches our interest. Therefore, when we write a report or an explanation on a newly- developed technology intended for readers in- cluding laypersons, it is very important to com- pose a title that will stimulate their interest in the technology. However, technical specialists are not necessarily good at composing appeal- ing titles, because it isn’t clear what sort of titles will stimulate the interest of lay readers in the technology. In the field of NLP and linguistics, there are few researches which help the specialists com- pose appealing titles for lay readers. Several researches have been reported on title genera- tion (Jin and Hauptmann, 2000) (Berger and Mittal, 2000) and readability of texts (Minel et al., 1997) (Hartley and Sydes, 1997) (Inui et al., 2003). However, the researches on title gener- ation focus on generating a very compact sum- mary of the document rather than composing an appealing title. The previous researches on readability mainly see it as comprehensibility rather than interestingness. In this regard, our previous study (Senda and Sinohara, 2002) clarified what sort of content and wording in titles are effective in stimulat- ing lay readers’ interest in the technology by an analysis of a parallel corpus of Japanese techni- cal paper titles and Japanese newspapers head- lines. The study categorized the effective con- tent and wording of the titles into the following three key points. Key Point 1 (for Wording) Instead of tech- nical terms, use synonymous plain terms even where the plain term is not synony- mous with the technical term in a …

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