ISCL Hauptseminar
Summer Semester 2011, Prof. Meurers
Summarization
Abstract:
Automatic Summarization deals with the challenge of producing a shortened verison of a text or a collection of texts which the goal of including the most important information. While basic systems focus on identifying and extracting relevant sentences from the text, more advanced systems identify and abstract information from the source documents and attempt to produce shortened texts using natural language generation. The issue what constitutes important information is made explicit in so-called query- or question-based summarization systems, which attempt to summarize text under the perspective of a particular question.
This seminar is intended as an introduction to the active field of automatic summarization. We will explore the key issues and approaches and how they link to related topics such as question answering and paraphrasing. The question how to evaluation automatic summarization approaches will also play an important role.
Instructor: Detmar Meurers
Course meets: in Seminarraum 1.13, Blochbau (Wilhelmstr. 19)
Credits and Campus:
Syllabus (this file):
Moodle page: https://moodle01.zdv.uni-tuebingen.de/course/view.php?id=592
Nature of course and our expectations: This is a Hauptseminar intended to provide an overview of the current approaches in this active research area. Each participant is expected to
Note: Following the standard rules missing more than two meetings unexcused, automatically results in failing the class.
Academic conduct and misconduct: Research is driven by discussion and free exchange of ideas, motivations, and perspectives. So you are encouraged to work in groups, discuss, and exchange ideas. At the same time, the foundation of the free exchange of ideas is that everyone is open about where they obtained which information. Concretely, this means you are expected to always make explicit when you’ve worked on something as a team – and keep in mind that being part of a team always means sharing the work.
For text you write, you always have to provide explicit references for any ideas or passages you reuse from somewhere else. Note that this includes text “found” on the web, where you should cite the url of the web site in case no more official publication is available.
Class etiquette: Please do not read or work on materials for other classes in our seminar. Come to class on time and do not pack up early. All portable electronic devices such as laptops and cell phones should be switched off for the entire length of the flight, oops, class. If for some reason, you must leave early or you have an important call coming in, or you have to miss class for an important reason, please let me know before class.
Topics
Spärck Jones, Karen. ”Automatic summarising: The state of the art.” Information Processing and Management 43.6 (2007), 1449-1481.
Sessions
Note that the following session plan is subject to change; it only constitutes the current state of our planning as the semester unfolds.
Hovy, E. (2005). Automated Text Summarization. In R. Mitkov (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics, Oxford University Press, pp. 583–598.
Last update: July 31, 2013