This position paper outlines the various context factors to be considered in order to develop effective methods for summarization and its evaluation. A key argument is that we cannot develop useful summarization systems unless we pay close attention to both the context (where summarization is applied), and the purpose (why is it done).
The paper analyses three key factors: (1) the input to the summarization model, (2) the purpose of the output summaries, and (3) the output format of the summaries.
A summary is loosely defined as a reductive transformation of source text through content reduction by selection and/or generalization on what is important in the source. A possible three-step model to achieve this can be:
- I : source text interpretation (to source text representation)
- T : source representation transformation (to summary text represe