Text Summarization and Cognitive Styles

From Distributed Information and Intelligence Analysis Group

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 a timely decision. The quality of a summary may improve a user’s performance in an information seeking task if it includes the relevant information that he/she is looking for in a way he/she prefers. On the other hand, it may degrade a user’s performance if the important information is omitted or information is presented poorly. Some existing approaches have used a user’s interests to help in the design of 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 in this paper is to investigate the impact of a user’s cognitive styles when assessing multi-document summaries.