User-model based personalized summarization

The potential of summary personalization is high, because a summary that would be useless to decide the relevance of a document if summarized in a generic manner, may be useful if the right sentences are selected that match the user interest. In this paper we defend the use of a personalized summarization facility to maximize the density of relevance of selections sent by a personalized information system to a given user. The personalization is applied to the digital newspaper domain and it used a user-model that stores long and short term interests using four reference systems: sections, categories, keywords and feedback terms. On the other side, it is crucial to measure how much information is lost during the summarization process, and how this information loss may affect the ability of the user to judge the relevance of a given document. The results obtained in two personalization systems show that personalized summaries perform better than generic and generic-personalized summaries in terms of identifying documents that satisfy user preferences. We also considered a user-centred direct evaluation that showed a high level of user satisfaction with the summaries.