Development and evaluation of a multi-document summarization method focusing on research concepts and their research relationships

• Main Authors: Ou, Shiyan, Goh, Dion Hoe-Lian, Khoo, Christopher S. G.
• Other Authors: Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Information systems::Information storage and retrieval
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/91364; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/6119
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper reports the design and evaluation of a method for summarizing a set of related research abstracts. This summarization method extracts research concepts and their research relationships from different abstracts, integrates the extracted information across abstracts, and presents the integrated information in a Web-based interface to generate a multi-document summary. This study focused on sociology dissertation abstracts, but can be extended to other research abstracts. The summarization method was evaluated in a user study to assess the quality and usefulness of the generated summaries in comparison to a sentence extraction method used in MEAD and a method that extracts only research objective sentences. The evaluation results indicated that the majority of sociology researchers preferred our variable-based summary generated with the use of a taxonomy.