Introduction - Methods for Mining and Summarizing Text Conversations - page 16

Jane:
I was thinking of going to Mexico over the spring break.

Mark
great idea!

Jane (reply-all)

What about going skiing for a few days?

Mark (to Jane)
see you in class or after the break

==========

Kai
No Mexico, sorry, I need to catch up with 502.
...Do you guys have any idea on how to deal with Q1?

==========
Mark (reply-all)

....
I am also having problems.

==========

Jane
Let's talk tomorrow at UBC after class.

Figure 1.7: Sample extractive summary of our synthetic email conversation.

Indicative vs. Informative Summarization We can discriminate summaries based on how they
are intended to function with regards to the source document(s). Informative summaries attempt to

informative

convey the most important information of a document. The notion of substitutability is central to the
idea of an informative summary, as the summary should convey enough of the critical information
that it is able to stand in for the source document. On the other hand, indicative summaries give

indicative

a high-level outline of the document but do not attempt to convey all of the critical information
from the source. They are typically provided so that the reader can decide whether or not to start
reading the source document. In practice, a given summary may be a mixture of both types. As one