Place: CS Conference Room in MUDD
Abstract:
Email threads facilitate a variety of different tasks such as discussing important issues, answering questions, and requesting actions, to name but a few. With this spectrum of usage, it makes sense that an email thread summarizer should utilize the resulting dialogue-like structure associated with each of these tasks to improve the quality of the generated summary. While previous research has tended to focus on question-answer thread structure, this talk presents a preliminary investigation which accounts for the structure of discussion threads. In particular, we examine the task of summarizing consensus within this type of thread. Our summarization approach attempts to identify and present the issue being discussed, for example the planning of an event, and the resulting agreement or disagreement voiced within the responses of the email thread participants.