Summarizing Information: Including CD-ROM "Simsum", Simulation of Summarizing, for Macintosh and Windows

ISBN-13: 9783642720277 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 375 str.

Brigitte Endres-Niggemeyer

Opis

Summarizing is the process of reducing the large volume of information in something like a novel or a scientific paper to a short summary or abstract comprising only the most essential points. Summarizing is frequent in everyday communication, but it is also a professional skill for journalists and scientific writers. Automated summarizing functions are urgently needed by Internet users who wish to exploit the information available without being overwhelmed.
This book presents the state of the art of summarizing and surveys related research; it deals with everyday and professional summarizing as well as computerized approaches. The author focuses in detail on the cognitive processes involved and supports this with a multimedia simulation system on the accompanying CD-ROM (for Mac OS 7.5 and Windows 95).

Spis treści

1 Introduction.- 2 Communication and Cognition.- 2.1 Introduction.- 2.2 Communication situations.- 2.3 The cognitive structure of a situated communicator.- 2.3.1 The role of metaphors: The library metaphor, the computer metaphor, and the ecosystem metaphor.- 2.3.2 Systems structured by levels and modules.- 2.3.3 Communication ability in real-world situations.- 2.3.4 Memory and mental representation.- 2.4 Forms of representation.- 2.4.1 Concepts with categories and properties.- 2.4.2 Propositions.- 2.4.3 Larger meaning units: Schemata, frames, scripts, and memory organization packets (MOPs).- 2.4.4 Integrated representation.- 2.4.5 Procedural knowledge.- 2.5 Understanding.- 2.5.1 Introduction: General assumptions about discourse processing and understanding.- 2.5.2 Understanding during reading.- 2.5.3 Understanding as knowledge acquisition from text.- 2.6 Discourse production.- References.- 3 Summarizing in Everyday Communication.- 3.1 Introduction.- 3.1.1 The summarizing situation.- 3.1.2 The information to be summarized: Memory representation or external information, object representation and discourse representation.- 3.1.3 The summarizer.- 3.1.4 The target group: The users of summaries.- 3.2 The process of summarization.- 3.3 What we know about summarizing in everyday life.- 3.3.1 Understanding and summarizing.- 3.3.2 An empirical look at summarization strategies or operators.- 3.4 Assessing importance (relevance, interestingness).- 3.4.1 Introduction.- 3.4.2 Importance depending on source information features.- 3.4.2.1 Semantic constituents of events and action-based stories.- 3.4.2.2 Plot units: Semantic structure in terms of affect states.- 3.4.2.3 The causal network and the causal chain.- 3.4.3 Importance for communication.- 3.4.4 Situated relevance.- 3.4.5 Interpersonal and situational differences in importance ratings.- References.- 4 Professional Summarizing.- 4.1 Introduction: Professional summarizing.- 4.2 Knowledge about professional summarizing.- 4.2.1 Subprocesses of professional summarizing.- 4.2.2 Cognitive science accounts of abstracting.- 4.2.3 Conceptual models of indexing and classifying.- 4.3 An empirical cognitive model of professional summarizing.- 4.3.1 The path from summarization practice to its computer simulation.- 4.3.2 Setting up the empirical model.- 4.3.3 Global features of professional summarizing.- 4.3.4 Central summarization subtasks: Exploration, relevance assessment and summary production.- 4.3.4.1 Document exploration.- 4.3.4.2 Assessing relevance and recognizing the thematic structure.- 4.3.4.3 Summary production by cutting and pasting.- 4.3.5 Why and how natural summarizing examples are presented.- 4.3.6 Real-world summarizing steps and sequences.- 4.3.6.1 Working step Judge-3: “Let me see what the article is about”.- 4.3.6.2 The Mackin sequence: Discovering the theme and writing the topic sentence.- 4.3.6.3 The Trueby sequence of online abstracting.- 4.3.6.4 The Hearn sequence: How a document type-specific working plan is developed and applied.- 4.3.6.5 The Black sequence: Professional document use and incremental construction of a macrostatement.- 4.3.6.6 The Goonatilake sequence: Dynamic reading techniques.- 4.3.6.7 The Rada sequence of pragmatic indexing.- 4.3.6.8 The Sped sequence — the difficult representation of the epistemological subject model.- 4.3.6.9 Working step Mills-15: A classification notation is assigned.- References.- 4.4 Appendix: The intellectual toolbox.- 4.4.1 Systematic display.- 4.4.2 Alphabetical index of strategies.- 5 Computational Approaches.- 5.1 Introduction.- 5.1.1 Computerized summarization presupposes a computerized situation.- 5.1.2 Overview.- 5.2 Early approaches: The creation of computer abstracts by sentence extraction.- 5.2.1 Luhn’s abstracting system.- 5.2.2 The TRW study: An abstracting system and a research methodology.- 5.2.3 ADAM — the automatic document abstracting method.- 5.2.4 Sentence extraction on the basis of the functional text weight.- 5.3 Systems following the advent of cognitive science.- 5.3.1 FRUMP.- 5.3.2 SUSY — a summarizing system for scientific texts.- 5.3.3 TOPIC/TWRM-TOPOGRAPHIC: Indicative summaries from text graphs.- 5.3.4 SCISOR (System for Conceptual Information Summarization, Organization, and Retrieval).- 5.3.5 PAULINE: Pragmatic aspects of text production.- 5.4 New technology, increased demand, a new wave of systems.- 5.4.1 New extraction systems.- 5.4.2 Referent tracking replaces word frequency counts.- 5.4.3 From discourse structures to summaries.- 5.4.4 Combining methods from different backgrounds.- 5.4.5 Summary text production from formatted data input.- 5.4.6 Generating summaries from mixed-mode event data.- References.

Blurb

Summarizing is the process of reducing the large volume of information in something like a novel or a scientific paper to a short summary or abstract comprising only the most essential points. Summarizing is frequent in everyday communication, but it is also a professional skill for journalists and scientific writers. Automated summarizing functions are urgently needed by Internet users who wish to exploit the information available without being overwhelmed.
This book presents the state of the art of summarizing and surveys related research; it deals with everyday and professional summarizing as well as computerized approaches. The author focuses in detail on the cognitive processes involved and supports this with a multimedia simulation system on the accompanying CD-ROM (for Mac OS and Windows 95).