Rebecca Passonneau Consulting Research Scientist, becky@cs.columbia.edu

Ani Nenkova Grad student, ani@cs.columbia.edu


Title: Evaluating Content Selection in Human- or Machine-Generated Summaries: The Pyramid Scoring Method

Time: Thursday October 9 , 11:30 - 12:30

Place: CS Conference Room in MUDD

Abstract:

>From the outset of automated generation of summaries, the difficulty of evaluation has been widely discussed. Despite many promising attempts, we believe it remains an unsolved problem. Here we present a method for scoring the content of summaries of any length against a weighted inventory of content units, which we refer to as a pyramid. Our method is derived from empirical analysis of human-generated summaries, and provides an informative metric for human or machine-generated summaries. It is particularly suited for naturalistic summaries of multiple documents.