{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,4]],"date-time":"2026-04-04T06:19:31Z","timestamp":1775283571482,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":41,"publisher":"Cambridge University Press (CUP)","issue":"2","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2010,3,24]],"date-time":"2010-03-24T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1269388800000},"content-version":"unspecified","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/terms"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Nat. Lang. Eng."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2010,4]]},"abstract":"<jats:title>Abstract<\/jats:title><jats:p>Web-based discussion fora proliferate on the Internet. These fora consist of threads about specific matters. Existing forum search facilities provide an easy way for finding threads of interest. However, understanding the content of threads is not always trivial. This problem becomes more pressing as threads become longer. It frustrates users that are looking for specific information and also makes it more difficult to make valuable contributions to a discussion. We postulate that having a concise summary of a thread would greatly help forum users. But, how would we best create such summaries? In this paper, we present an automated method of summarising threads in discussion fora. Compared with summarisation of unstructured texts and spoken dialogues, the structural characteristics of threads give important advantages. We studied how to best exploit these characteristics. Messages in threads contain both explicit and implicit references to each other and are structured. Therefore, we term the threads<jats:italic>hierarchical dialogues<\/jats:italic>. Our proposed summarisation algorithm produces one summary of an hierarchical dialogue by \u2018cherry-picking\u2019 sentences out of the original messages that make up a thread. We try to select sentences usable for obtaining an overview of the discussion. Our method is built around a set of heuristics based on observations of real fora discussions. The data used for this research was in Dutch, but the developed method equally applies to other languages. We evaluated our approach using a prototype. Users judged our summariser as very useful, half of them indicating they would use it regularly or always when visiting fora.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1017\/s135132491000001x","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2010,3,24]],"date-time":"2010-03-24T14:22:15Z","timestamp":1269440535000},"page":"161-192","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":16,"title":["Automatic summarisation of discussion fora"],"prefix":"10.1017","volume":"16","author":[{"given":"ALMER S.","family":"TIGELAAR","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"RIEKS","family":"OP DEN AKKER","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"DJOERD","family":"HIEMSTRA","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"56","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2010,3,24]]},"reference":[{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref41","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1162\/089120102762671945"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref39","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"549","DOI":"10.3115\/1220355.1220434","volume-title":"Proceedings of COLING","author":"Wan","year":"2004"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref35","unstructured":"Rienks R. 2007. Meetings in Smart Environments: Implications of Progressing Technology. Ph.D. thesis, University of Twente."},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref34","first-page":"46","article-title":"Gestalt: an introduction to the Ratcliff\/Obershelp pattern matching algorithm","volume":"7","author":"Ratcliff","year":"1988","journal-title":"Dr. Dobbs Journal"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref31","first-page":"542","volume-title":"Proceedings of CICLing","author":"McKeown","year":"2007"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref30","volume-title":"Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing","author":"Manning","year":"1999"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref28","first-page":"331","volume-title":"Proceedings of ICML","author":"Lang","year":"1995"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref27","volume-title":"Proceedings of CSCW (Interactive Posters)","author":"Lam","year":"2002"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref26","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/324133.324140"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref25","unstructured":"Klaas M. 2005. Toward indicative discussion fora summarization. Technical Report UBC-CS TR-2005-04, University of British Columbia."},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref21","first-page":"340","volume-title":"Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics and Speech Recognition","author":"Jurafsky","year":"2000"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref20","unstructured":"Hovy E. , Hermjakob U. , and Ravichandran D. 2002. Qtargets used in webclopedia. http:\/\/www.isi.edu\/natural-language\/projects\/webclopedia\/Taxonomy"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref19","first-page":"583","volume-title":"The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics: Text Summarization","author":"Hovy","year":"2004"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref18","first-page":"51","volume-title":"Proceedings of WAR I","author":"Hoste","year":"2007"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref16","unstructured":"Francis W. N. , and K\u00fbcera H. 1979. Brown corpus manual. http:\/\/icame.uib.no\/brown\/bcm.html"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref15","first-page":"208","volume-title":"Proceedings of HLT-NAACL","author":"Feng","year":"2006"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref14","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"532","DOI":"10.1145\/502585.502678","volume-title":"Proceedings of CIKM","author":"Farell","year":"2001"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref38","unstructured":"Stegeman L. 2007. Hammer tagger. http:\/\/wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl\/~infrieks\/stt\/stt.html"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref12","unstructured":"van Eynde F. 2004. Part of Speech Tagging en Lemmatisering van het Corpus Gesproken Nederlands. Centre for Computerlinguistics, Catholic University of Leuven."},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref10","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1162\/089120100750105966"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"994","DOI":"10.3115\/1220355.1220498","volume-title":"Proceedings of COLING","author":"Dalli","year":"2004"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref5","unstructured":"Bogers T. 2004. Dutch Named Entity Recognition: Optimizing Features, Algorithms, and Output. Master's thesis, University of Tilburg."},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref3","first-page":"72","volume-title":"Proceedings of ADCS","author":"Baldwin","year":"2007"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref2","first-page":"59","volume-title":"Proceedings of International Symposium on Reference Resolution in NLP","author":"op den Akker","year":"2002"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref8","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1037\/h0076540"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref40","first-page":"125","volume-title":"Proceedings of ACL Demo and Poster Sessions","author":"Weimer","year":"2007"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref32","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1023\/A:1011184828072"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref33","first-page":"105","volume-title":"Proceedings of HTL\/NAACL Short Papers","author":"Rambow","year":"2004"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref4","unstructured":"Bird S. , Klein E. , and Loper E. 2008. Natural language processing in python. http:\/\/nltk.sourceforge.net\/index.php\/Book (Draft Version 0.9.2)."},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref7","first-page":"91","volume-title":"Proceedings of WWW","author":"Carenini","year":"2007"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref6","first-page":"45","volume-title":"Proceedings of CLIN","author":"Bouma","year":"2000"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref22","volume-title":"Proceedings of ISWC","author":"Kim","year":"2006"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref36","unstructured":"Sang E. T. K. 2005. Language-independent named entity recognition. http:\/\/www.cnts.ua.ac.be\/conll2002\/ner\/"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref13","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1002\/isaf.211"},{"key":"S135132491000001X_ref11","unstructured":"DuBay W. H. 2004. The principles of readability. 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