Abstract
We propose a multiple-document summarization system with user interaction for coping appropriately with the user's varying summarization needs. Generally, automatic document summarization is a technology for producing a summary corresponding to a single document. However, in order that a person can better perform intellectual activities, a technology for producing a summary of more than one document (i.e. multiple-document summarization) becomes more important than producing a summary of a single document. Our multiple-document summarization system extracts keywords from the document set to be summarized and displays the k best keywords scored by our system to a user on the screen. From the displayed keywords, the user selects those reflecting the user's summarization needs. Here, in this paper, we define a user's “summarization needs” as content in which that particular user is interested. Our multiple-document summarization system produces a summary suitable for a user's summarization needs by using user-selected keywords. For evaluation of our method, we participated in the TSC3 of NTCIR4, an evaluation workshop for information retrieval and summarization held by National Institute of Informatics. We participated in this workshop by having our system select the 12 best keywords as scored by our system, and our entered system exhibited good performance in content evaluation of multiple-document summarization task. Moreover, we evaluate the effectiveness of user interaction, and the experimental results show that our user interaction system is effective.
