Facilitating online discussions by automatic summarization

Abstract

In the DISCOSUMO project, we aim to develop a computational toolkit to automatically summarize discussion forum threads. In this paper, we present the initial design of the toolkit, the data that we work with and the challenges we face. Discussion threads on a single topic can easily consist of hundreds or even thousands of individual contributions, with no obvious way to gain a quick overview of what kind of information is contained within the thread. We address the summarization of forum threads with domain-independent and language-independent methodology. We evaluate our system on data from four different web forums, covering different domains, languages and user communities. Our approach is largely unsupervised, using recurrent neural networks. Evaluation of the first version should point out where in the pipeline supervised techniques and/or heuristics are required to improve our summarization toolbox. If successful, the automatic summarization of discussion forum threads will play an important role in facilitating easy participation in online discussions.