A Multiple-Document Summarization System with User Interaction

A Multiple-Document Summarization System with User Interaction Hiroyuki SAKAI Toyohashi University of Technology 1-1 Hibarigaoka, Tempaku, Toyohashi 441-8580, Japan, sakai@smlab.tutkie.tut.ac.jp Shigeru MASUYAMA Toyohashi University of Technology 1-1 Hibarigaoka, Tempaku, Toyohashi 441-8580, Japan, masuyama@tutkie.tut.ac.jp Abstract We propose a multiple-document summa- rization system with user interaction. Our system extracts keywords from sets of docu- ments to be summarized and shows the key- words to a user on the screen. Among them, the user selects some keywords reflecting his/her needs. Our system controls the pro- duced summary by using these selected key- words. For evaluation of our method, we participated in TSC3 of NTCIR4 workshop by letting our system select 12 best key- words regarding scoring by the system. Our participated system attained the best per- formance in content evaluation among sys- tems not using sets of questions. Moreover, we evaluated effectiveness of user interac- tion in our system. With user interaction, our system attained both higher coverage and precision than that without user inter- action. 1 Introduction Recent rapid progress of computer and com- munication technologies enabled us to access enormous amount of machine-readable informa- tion easily. However, this has caused the in- formation overload problem. In order to solve this problem, automatic summarization meth- ods have been studied (Mani and T.Maybury, 1999). In particular, the necessity for a multiple-document summarization has been in- creasing and the multiple-document summa- rization technology has been intensively studied recently (Mani, 2001). In this paper, we define multiple-document summarization as a process for producing a summary from a relevant document set. Such a document set may be very large and may con- tain a number of topics. It is preferable that a summary produced by a multiple-document summarization system from the document set covers all topics contained in the document set. However, it is difficult to produce a summary that covers all the topics in the document set with a small number of characters. For example, a document set relevant to “releasing AIBO” contains some topics, e.g., what is AIBO?, how to sell AIBO?, etc. Moreover, sentences recog- nized as important sentences considerably dif- fer person to person (Nomoto and Matsumoto, 2001). This is because “summarization need”, i.e., topics a different person wants to read, may differ. Hence, we propose a multiple-document summarization system with user interaction for coping appropriately with user’s summarization need. Our system extracts keywords from a doc- ument set to be summarized and shows the key- words to a user. Among them, the user selects keywords reflecting user’s summarization need. Our system controls a produced summary by using the keywords selected by the user. For re- alizing our purpose, we have devised a scoring method for keywords extraction specialized to our purpose. We would like to emphasize here the fact that scoring of words for extracting key- words shown to a user is crucial for the system performance as well as different from those used in usual automatic indexing. We participated in TSC3 (Text Summariza- tion Challenge - 3) of NTCIR4 workshop …

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