User-Specific Summarisation
Speaker:Thade Nahnsen
Institution: University of Edinburgh
Abstract:
Research in summarisation has traditionally focused on generating general-purpose summaries, or ones directed at specific audiences such as doctors for treatment summaries. Only as part of this year's DUC have researchers progressively started to investigate tailoring summaries to the reader's specific knowledge. In particular, the DUC task considered the case that the reader of a certain summary has already read another - related - set of documents. While this task is relatively clear-cut, its scope is limited in the sense that other factors such as changes in interests over time, the degree to which, and the period of time for which readers can be assumed to be familiar with the content of previously read documents are all central to tailoring summaries to the needs and knowledge of particular users, but are not really addressed. On this background, I will expand onthese and related issues, and present my approach to generating user-specific summaries.