SIDE: Summarization Integrated Development Environment

Information Retrieval, Text Mining and Analytics

SIDE is an infrastructure that facilitates construction of summaries tailored to the needs of the user. It aims to address the issue that there is no such thing as the perfect summary for all purposes. Rather, the quality of a summary is subjective, task-dependent, and possibly user-specific. The SIDE framework allows users flexibility in determining what they find more useful in a summary, both in terms of structure and content. In recent work we have begun to explore statistical approaches to text compression that utilize syntactic dependency features and discourse level features to achieve a higher level of fluency at more severe levels of compression. Our near-future plans include exploring the idea of text simplification. An important application area is rapid prototyping of reporting interfaces for online discussion facilitators.