Summarizing electronic discourse

The explosion of available information on the Internet has fueled the demand for automatic methods of text summarization. Existing approaches have primarily focused on abstracting documents such as news articles or technical papers. In this article, we examine how to create summaries of on‐line asynchronous communication, in particular, discussion groups. First, we provide background on the nature of discussions as informal communication, and then we give a short history of computer conferencing and discussion systems. We then explain our approach to the problem and a set of observations and experiments we have done, putting our work in the context of research on automatic text summarization. We then describe a hierarchical discourse summarization algorithm and its implementation in system called Interactive Discussion Summarizer (IDS). We close with discussion and conclusions.