Dynamic Presentation of Document Content for Rapid On-Line Skimming

Intelligent Text Summarization

Volume

Papers from the 1998 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

A wide range of current approaches to document summarisation utilise a strategy of data reduction over the original document source, whereby fragments of source text that are somehow identified as 'most representative' of the document’s content are extracted and presented to the user. In order for these fragments to be useful as summaries, it is necessary to know how they relate to the document; in order for these fragments to be usable as summaries, they must serve as windows into the document as a whole, with suitably designed interfaces for navigation into areas of particular interest. This paper discusses the notion of strong contextualisation of document highlights, how this translates into necessary features for document analysis, and how the document abstractions derived from such principles facilitate dynamic delivery of document content. We argue that dynamic document abstractions effectively mediate different levels of granularity of analysis, from terse document highlights to fully contextualised foci of particular interest. We describe a range of dynamic document viewers which embody novel presentation metaphors for document content delivery.