Single-document and multi-document summarization techniques for email threads using sentence compression

We present two approaches to email thread summarization: Collective Message Summarization (CMS) applies a multi-document summarization approach, while Individual Message Summarization (IMS) treats the problem as a sequence of single-document summarization tasks. Both approaches are implemented in our general framework driven by sentence compression. Instead of a purely extractive approach, we employ linguistic and statistical methods to generate multiple compressions, and then select from those candidates to produce a final summary. We demonstrate these ideas on the Enron collection--a very challenging corpus because of the highly technical language. Experimental results point to two findings: that CMS represents a better approach to email thread summarization, and that current sentence compression techniques do not improve summarization performance in this genre.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: IPM
• Authors: David M. Zajic, Bonnie J. Dorr, Jimmy J. Lin
• Keywords: Collective Message Summarization, IPM 2008, Message Summarization, Multi-document Summarization Approach