2004 Presentations (Communicative Events)

User-Sensitive Text Summarization - Thesis Summary

Elhadad, Noemie

Text summarization has emerged as an increasingly established field over the course of the past ten years. We may soon reach a stage where researchers will be able to design, and provide everyday users with, robust text summarization systems. Users of text summarization are many and range from the Internet surfers lacking the time to locate and digest all the latest news available on the web to scientists unable to keep pace with the burgeoning number of technical publications who must, nonetheless, be familiar with the latest findings in their fields. Given texts to summarize, there is no a priori criteria for determining relevance for the summary. When humans summarize texts, they identify relevant information that they think will be of interest to the readers.