Textual Summarisation of Large Sets: Towards a General Approach

We are developing techniques to generate summary descriptions of sets of objects. In this paper, we present and evaluate a rule-based NLG technique for summarising sets of bibliographical references in academic papers. This extends our previous work on summarising sets of consumer products and shows how our model generalises across these two very different domains.

Using Textual Summaries to Describe a Set of Products

When customers are faced with the task of making a purchase in an unfamiliar product domain, it might be useful to provide them with an overview of the product set to help them understand what they can expect. In this paper we present and evaluate a method to summarise sets of products in natural language, focusing on the price range, common product features across the set, and product features that impact on price. In our study, participants reported that they found our summaries useful, but we found no evidence that the summaries influenced the selections made by participants.