Diffusion of Abstractive Summarisation to Improve Ease of Use and Usefulness

Even though the abstractive summarisation method has been in existence for over four decades, its popularity, adoption and diffusion have been slow, or limited, in both business and academic domains. This has retarded advances of the innovation and hampered its potential benefits to users. Thus, this qualitative, empirical study was undertaken to examine and understand how the abstractive summarisation method can be diffused to increase its spread and usefulness across business and academic environments. The 1995 theory of Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) by Rogers was employed in the analysis of the existing works. Based on analysis, five main factors were identified as influencing the adoption of the abstractive summarisation method. The factors are complexity, practical effectiveness, experimental, shortened output and lack of friendliness. These factors were discussed towards gaining a better understanding of how the diffusion of abstractive summarisation method can be improved in both business and academic environments.