Title
Do summaries help?
Abstract
We describe a task-based evaluation to determine whether multi-document summaries measurably improve user performance whe using online news browsing systems for directed research. We evaluated the multi-document summaries generated by Newsblaster, a robust news browsing system that clusters online news articles and summarizes multiple articles on each event. Four groups of subjects were asked to perform the same time-restricted fact-gathering tasks, reading news under different conditions: no summaries at all, single sentence summaries drawn from one of the articles, Newsblaster multi-document summaries, and human summaries. Our results show that, in comparison to source documents only, the quality of reports assembled using Newsblaster summaries was significantly better and user satisfaction was higher with both Newsblaster and human summaries.
Year
DOI
Venue
2005
10.1145/1076034.1076072
SIGIR
Keywords
Field
DocType
different condition,newsblaster summary,online news,multi-document summary,user satisfaction,user performance whe,robust news,human summary,clusters online news article,newsblaster multi-document summary,text summarization,evaluation
Automatic summarization,Information retrieval,Computer science,Source document,Sentence
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
1-59593-034-5
25
1.33
References 
Authors
8
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kathleen R. McKeown14990741.29
Rebecca J. Passonneau2978160.46
David K. Elson320214.25
Ani Nenkova41831109.14
Julia Hirschberg52982448.62