Summarizing Information

1 Introduction.- 2 Communication and Cognition.- 2.1 Introduction.- 2.2 Communication situations.- 2.3 The cognitive structure of a situated communicator.- 2.3.1 The role of metaphors: The library metaphor, the computer metaphor, and the ecosystem metaphor.- 2.3.2 Systems structured by levels and modules.- 2.3.3 Communication ability in real-world situations.- 2.3.4 Memory and mental representation.- 2.4 Forms of representation.- 2.4.1 Concepts with categories and properties.- 2.4.2 Propositions.- 2.4.3 Larger meaning units: Schemata, frames, scripts, and memory organization packets (MOPs).- 2.4.4 Integrated representation.- 2.4.5 Procedural knowledge.- 2.5 Understanding.- 2.5.1 Introduction: General assumptions about discourse processing and understanding.- 2.5.2 Understanding during reading.- 2.5.3 Understanding as knowledge acquisition from text.- 2.6 Discourse production.- References.- 3 Summarizing in Everyday Communication.- 3.1 Introduction.- 3.1.1 The summarizing situation.- 3.1.2 The information to be summarized: Memory representation or external information, object representation and discourse representation.- 3.1.3 The summarizer.- 3.1.4 The target group: The users of summaries.- 3.2 The process of summarization.- 3.3 What we know about summarizing in everyday life.- 3.3.1 Understanding and summarizing.- 3.3.2 An empirical look at summarization strategies or operators.- 3.4 Assessing importance (relevance, interestingness).- 3.4.1 Introduction.- 3.4.2 Importance depending on source information features.- 3.4.2.1 Semantic constituents of events and action-based stories.- 3.4.2.2 Plot units: Semantic structure in terms of affect states.- 3.4.2.3 The causal network and the causal chain.- 3.4.3 Importance for communication.- 3.4.4 Situated relevance.- 3.4.5 Interpersonal and situational differences in importance ratings.- References.- 4 Professional Summarizing.- 4.1 Introduction: Professional summarizing.- 4.2 Knowledge about professional summarizing.- 4.2.1 Subprocesses of professional summarizing.- 4.2.2 Cognitive science accounts of abstracting.- 4.2.3 Conceptual models of indexing and classifying.- 4.3 An empirical cognitive model of professional summarizing.- 4.3.1 The path from summarization practice to its computer simulation.- 4.3.2 Setting up the empirical model.- 4.3.3 Global features of professional summarizing.- 4.3.4 Central summarization subtasks: Exploration, relevance assessment and summary production.- 4.3.4.1 Document exploration.- 4.3.4.2 Assessing relevance and recognizing the thematic structure.- 4.3.4.3 Summary production by cutting and pasting.- 4.3.5 Why and how natural summarizing examples are presented.- 4.3.6 Real-world summarizing steps and sequences.- 4.3.6.1 Working step Judge-3: "Let me see what the article is about".- 4.3.6.2 The Mackin sequence: Discovering the theme and writing the topic sentence.- 4.3.6.3 The Trueby sequence of online abstracting.- 4.3.6.4 The Hearn sequence: How a document type-specific working plan is developed and applied.- 4.3.6.5 The Black sequence: Professional document use and incremental construction of a macrostatement.- 4.3.6.6 The Goonatilake sequence: Dynamic reading techniques.- 4.3.6.7 The Rada sequence of pragmatic indexing.- 4.3.6.8 The Sped sequence - the difficult representation of the epistemological subject model.- 4.3.6.9 Working step Mills-15: A classification notation is assigned.- References.- 4.4 Appendix: The intellectual toolbox.- 4.4.1 Systematic display.- 4.4.2 Alphabetical index of strategies.- 5 Computational Approaches.- 5.1 Introduction.- 5.1.1 Computerized summarization presupposes a computerized situation.- 5.1.2 Overview.- 5.2 Early approaches: The creation of computer abstracts by sentence extraction.- 5.2.1 Luhn's abstracting system.- 5.2.2 The TRW study: An abstracting system and a research methodology.- 5.2.3 ADAM - the automatic document abstracting method.- 5.2.4 Sentence extraction on the basis of the functional text weight.- 5.3 Systems following the advent of cognitive science.- 5.3.1 FRUMP.- 5.3.2 SUSY - a summarizing system for scientific texts.- 5.3.3 TOPIC/TWRM-TOPOGRAPHIC: Indicative summaries from text graphs.- 5.3.4 SCISOR (System for Conceptual Information Summarization, Organization, and Retrieval).- 5.3.5 PAULINE: Pragmatic aspects of text production.- 5.4 New technology, increased demand, a new wave of systems.- 5.4.1 New extraction systems.- 5.4.2 Referent tracking replaces word frequency counts.- 5.4.3 From discourse structures to summaries.- 5.4.4 Combining methods from different backgrounds.- 5.4.5 Summary text production from formatted data input.- 5.4.6 Generating summaries from mixed-mode event data.- References.