Single-Document and Multi-Document Summarization Techniques for Email Threads Using Sentence Compression First Author Affiliation / Address line 1

Abstract

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 our techniques on the Enron collection—a very challenging corpus because of the highly technical language. Results suggest that CMS represents a better approach and additional findings pave the way for future explorations.