What’s the Issue Here?: Task-based Evaluation of Reader Comment Summarization Systems

Emma Barker, Monica Paramita, Adam Funk, Emina Kurtic, Ahmet Aker, Jonathan Foster, Mark Hepple, Robert Gaizauskas


Abstract
Automatic summarization of reader comments in on-line news is an extremely challenging task and a capability for which there is a clear need. Work to date has focussed on producing extractive summaries using well-known techniques imported from other areas of language processing. But are extractive summaries of comments what users really want? Do they support users in performing the sorts of tasks they are likely to want to perform with reader comments? In this paper we address these questions by doing three things. First, we offer a specification of one possible summary type for reader comment, based on an analysis of reader comment in terms of issues and viewpoints. Second, we define a task-based evaluation framework for reader comment summarization that allows summarization systems to be assessed in terms of how well they support users in a time-limited task of identifying issues and characterising opinion on issues in comments. Third, we describe a pilot evaluation in which we used the task-based evaluation framework to evaluate a prototype reader comment clustering and summarization system, demonstrating the viability of the evaluation framework and illustrating the sorts of insight such an evaluation affords.
Anthology ID:
L16-1494
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
3094–3101
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1494
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Emma Barker, Monica Paramita, Adam Funk, Emina Kurtic, Ahmet Aker, Jonathan Foster, Mark Hepple, and Robert Gaizauskas. 2016. What’s the Issue Here?: Task-based Evaluation of Reader Comment Summarization Systems. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 3094–3101, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
What’s the Issue Here?: Task-based Evaluation of Reader Comment Summarization Systems (Barker et al., LREC 2016)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/starsem-semeval-split/L16-1494.pdf