Textual Summarization: A Comparative Study

摘要

Human beings are unique not only because they use language, but more importantly, they can provide condensation of salient information. Despite the claim that human subjects do not summarize in any consistent manner, in this paper, 235 university students from Mainland China and Taiwan are involved in conducting an experiment on textual summarization. Results show that: (ⅰ) in terms of identification of the most salient information, there is high correlation and relative consistency across the subjects; (ⅱ) there is some systematic variation between the two major groups. In an attempt to study to what extent these differences can be explained by social-cultural factors, further statistical analysis is conducted to study various factors that contribute to systematic variation in the subjects' judgement. It is found that factors, including discipline of study, reading habit, parental background and gender, though not as clearly pronounced as the university factor, lead to interesting observations.