Dynamic presentation of phrasally-based document abstractions

Summarisation technologies today work, in essence, by performing data reduction over the original document source. Document fragments, identified as particularly representative of content, are extracted and offered to the user. Typically, such fragments are sentence-sized, and the summary is nothing more than a concatenation of these sentences. We argue that, for content characterisation, phrasal units with certain discourse properties are more representative than sentences. From such a position, we outline a model of document content abstraction based on a notion of topically prominent topic stamps. For such abstractions to be useful, they need to retain contextual highlights of their occurrences in the documents; to be usable, they further need to be able to function as windows into the full documents, with suitably designed interfaces for navigation into areas of particular interest. This paper proposes a method for contextualizing document highlights, relates this to our model of salience-based content characterization, and demonstrates how the document abstractions derived from such principles facilitate dynamic document content presentation. We argue that dynamic document abstractions effectively mediate different levels of granularity analysis, from terse document highlights to fully contextualized foci of particular interest. We close by describing a range of dynamic document viewers which embody novel presentation metaphors for the delivery of document content.