Evaluation of the Effects of User-Sensitivity on Text Summarization

Along with research on information retrieval and filtering, text summarization is an effective technique to help users save time in finding critical information and making timely decisions. Some existing summarization approaches have used a userpsilas interests to develop a personalized text summarization system. However, there is inadequate focus on exploring cognitive styles, which have been found to affect the ways users think, perceive and remember information. Our main objective of this evaluation is to investigate the effect of a userpsilas cognitive style on multi-document summarization. We examine two dimensions of a userpsilas cognitive style which are the analytic/who list and verbal/imagery dimensions. We conducted an experiment to determine the impact of a userpsilas cognitive style when working with different types of document sets. The type of a document set refers to whether the content of this set is loosely related or closely related. Our results show that users in general are insensitive to the types of document sets both in terms of information covered in a summary as well as the way that a summary is written and presented. However, if we group users by the analytic/who list dimension, we found that people in groups are sensitive to the way that the information is presented for different types of document sets.