A rank-rewrite framework for summarizing XML documents

With XML becoming a standard for data representation and exchange, we can expect to see large scale repositories and warehouses of XML data. In order for users to understand and explore these large collections, a summarized, bird’s eye view of the available data is a necessity. In this paper, we are interested in semantic XML document summaries which present the “important” information available in an XML document to the user. In the best case, such a summary is a concise replacement for the original document itself. At the other extreme, it should at least help the user make an informed choice as to the relevance of the document to his needs. In this paper, we address the three main issues which arise in producing such meaningful and concise summaries: i) which tags or text units are important and should be included in the summary, ii) how can the selected tags and text be presented in a concise and coherent manner? and iii) how to generate a semantic summary for different memory budgets? We conduct user studies with different real-life datasets and show that our methods are useful and effective in practice.