Methods for Mining and Summarizing Text Conversations

Abstract

Due to the Internet Revolution, human conversational data -- in written forms -- are accumulating at a phenomenal rate. At the same time, improvements in speech technology enable many spoken conversations to be transcribed. Individuals and organizations engage in email exchanges, face-to-face meetings, blogging, texting and other social media activities. The advances in natural language processing provide ample opportunities for these "informal documents" to be analyzed and mined, thus creating numerous new and valuable applications. This book presents a set of computational methods to extract information from conversational data, and to provide natural language summaries of the data. The book begins with an overview of basic concepts, such as the differences between extractive and abstractive summaries, and metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of summarization and various extraction tasks. It also describes some of the benchmark corpora used in the literature.