A framework for the Comparative analysis of text summarization techniques

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced Analytics, specialization in Data ScienceWe see that with the boom of information technology and IOT (Internet of things), the size of information which is basically data is increasing at an alarming rate. This information can always be harnessed and if channeled into the right direction, we can always find meaningful information. But the problem is this data is not always numerical and there would be problems where the data would be completely textual, and some meaning has to be derived from it. If one would have to go through these texts manually, it would take hours or even days to get a concise and meaningful information out of the text. This is where a need for an automatic summarizer arises easing manual intervention, reducing time and cost but at the same time retaining the key information held by these texts. In the recent years, new methods and approaches have been developed which would help us to do so. These approaches are implemented in lot of domains, for example, Search engines provide snippets as document previews, while news websites produce shortened descriptions of news subjects, usually as headlines, to make surfing easier. Broadly speaking, there are mainly two ways of text summarization – extractive and abstractive summarization. Extractive summarization is the approach in which important sections of the whole text are filtered out to form the condensed form of the text. While the abstractive summarization is the approach in which the text as a whole is interpreted and examined and after discerning the meaning of the text, sentences are generated by the model itself describing the important points in a concise way

Spoken content retrieval: A survey of techniques and technologies

Speech media, that is, digital audio and video containing spoken content, has blossomed in recent years. Large collections are accruing on the Internet as well as in private and enterprise settings. This growth has motivated extensive research on techniques and technologies that facilitate reliable indexing and retrieval. Spoken content retrieval (SCR) requires the combination of audio and speech processing technologies with methods from information retrieval (IR). SCR research initially investigated planned speech structured in document-like units, but has subsequently shifted focus to more informal spoken content produced spontaneously, outside of the studio and in conversational settings. This survey provides an overview of the field of SCR encompassing component technologies, the relationship of SCR to text IR and automatic speech recognition and user interaction issues. It is aimed at researchers with backgrounds in speech technology or IR who are seeking deeper insight on how these fields are integrated to support research and development, thus addressing the core challenges of SCR

Collaborative development of the Arrowsmith two node search interface designed for laboratory investigators.

Arrowsmith is a unique computer-assisted strategy designed to assist investigators in detecting biologically-relevant connections between two disparate sets of articles in Medline. This paper describes how an inter-institutional consortium of neuroscientists used the UIC Arrowsmith web interface http://arrowsmith.psych.uic.edu in their daily work and guided the development, refinement and expansion of the system into a suite of tools intended for use by the wider scientific community

Discovery Is Never By Chance: Designing for (Un)Serendipity

Serendipity has a long tradition in the history of science as having played a key role in many significant discoveries. Computer scientists, valuing the role of serendipity in discovery, have attempted to design systems that encourage serendipity. However, that research has focused primarily on only one aspect of serendipity: that of chance encounters. In reality, for serendipity to be valuable chance encounters must be synthesized into insight. In this paper we show, through a formal consideration of serendipity and analysis of how various systems have seized on attributes of interpreting serendipity, that there is a richer space for design to support serendipitous creativity, innovation and discovery than has been tapped to date. We discuss how ideas might be encoded to be shared or discovered by ‘association-hunting’ agents. We propose considering not only the inventor’s role in perceiving serendipity, but also how that inventor’s perception may be enhanced to increase the opportunity for serendipity. We explore the role of environment and how we can better enable serendipitous discoveries to find a home more readily and immediately

QMOS: Query-based multi-documents opinion-oriented summarization

Sentiment analysis concerns the study of opinions expressed in a text. This paper presents the QMOS method, which employs a combination of sentiment analysis and summarization approaches. It is a lexicon-based method to query-based multi-documents summarization of opinion expressed in reviews. QMOS combines multiple sentiment dictionaries to improve word coverage limit of the individual lexicon. A major problem for a dictionary-based approach is the semantic gap between the prior polarity of a word presented by a lexicon and the word polarity in a specific context. This is due to the fact that, the polarity of a word depends on the context in which it is being used. Furthermore, the type of a sentence can also affect the performance of a sentiment analysis approach. Therefore, to tackle the aforementioned challenges, QMOS integrates multiple strategies to adjust word prior sentiment orientation while also considers the type of sentence. QMOS also employs the Semantic Sentiment Approach to determine the sentiment score of a word if it is not included in a sentiment lexicon. On the other hand, the most of the existing methods fail to distinguish the meaning of a review sentence and user's query when both of them share the similar bag-of-words; hence there is often a conflict between the extracted opinionated sentences and users’ needs. However, the summarization phase of QMOS is able to avoid extracting a review sentence whose similarity with the user's query is high but whose meaning is different. The method also employs the greedy algorithm and query expansion approach to reduce redundancy and bridge the lexical gaps for similar contexts that are expressed using different wording, respectively. Our experiment shows that the QMOS method can significantly improve the performance and make QMOS comparable to other existing methods

UniSumm and SummZoo: Unified Model and Diverse Benchmark for Few-Shot Summarization

The high annotation costs and diverse demands of various summarization tasks motivate the development of few-shot summarization. However, despite the emergence of many summarization tasks and datasets, the current training paradigm for few-shot summarization systems ignores potentially shareable knowledge in heterogeneous datasets. To this end, we propose \textsc{UniSumm}, a unified few-shot summarization model pre-trained with multiple summarization tasks and can be prefix-tuned to excel at any few-shot summarization task. Meanwhile, to better evaluate few-shot summarizers, under the principles of diversity and robustness, we assemble and release a new benchmark \textsc{SummZoo}. It consists of $8$ summarization tasks with multiple sets of few-shot samples for each task, covering diverse domains. Experimental results and analysis show that \textsc{UniSumm} outperforms strong baselines by a large margin across all sub-tasks in \textsc{SummZoo} under both automatic and human evaluations and achieves comparable results in human evaluation compared with a GPT-3.5 model.Comment: ACL2023 main conferenc