Summarization Assistant for News Brief Services on Cellular Phones

A Chinese news summarization method is proposed in order to help humans deal with the message services of news briefs broadcast over cell phones. The problem to be solved here is unique because a strict length limit (69 or 45 characters) is imposed on the summaries for the message service. This requires some sort of automatic sentence fusion, rather than sentence selection alone. In the proposed method, important sentences were first identified based on the news content. They were matched against the news headline to determine a suitable position for concatenation with the headline to become candidates. These candidates were then ranked by their length and fitness for manual selection. In our evaluation, among 40 short news updates in the inside testing set, over 75% (80%) of the best candidates yield acceptable summaries without manual editing for the length limit of 69 (45) characters. These numbers, however, reduce to 70.7% (53.3%) for the outside testing set of 75 news stories of ordinary length. It seems that the shorter the length limit, the more difficult the problem of getting the summary from long stories. Nevertheless, the proposed method has the potential not only to reduce the cost of manual operation, but also to integrate and synchronize with other media in such services in the future.