Compact Summarization for Mobile Phones

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new summarization method appropriate for sending text to mobile phones. In mobile access research, an important issue is how to display compact and informative summaries on a screen much smaller than that of an ordinary computer. Documents with varieties of genres presenting information such as opinions, evaluations, etc. have been published on the Web. Most previous summarization research, however, has focused on factual information and topics in documents. For a document that asserts the author’s opinion, we assumed that combining factual information and subjective information such as opinions would be effective to produce short but informative summaries adequate to comprehend the contents of the original documents. We propose a summarization method that exploits the typical text structure of the genre. We test the effectiveness of the proposed methods by asking three users who use the genre of ”columns” in ordinary life to evaluate summaries in aspect of the recognition test of important sentences and to demonstrate their comprehension of original documents. With the comprehension test, our method which was based on the usage of sentence types was evaluated to be more informative than the existing methods.