Multi-modal Summarization

Abstract

Multi-modal summarization is a technology that provides users with abridgments of topics of interest. Such abridgments consist of organized text and informative graphics. These summarizations have two roles. One is to assist the users to review and understand their topics of interest. The other is to guide users both visually and verbally in their exploratory search. To establish this technology, it was necessary to integrate several research streams. These included information access, information extraction, and information visualization; all of these technologies had been developing rapidly since the beginning of the twenty-first century. MuST was a workshop, the main theme of which was research on multi-modal summarization of trend information. It was not an evaluation workshop and did not present the participants with a specific task, because at the time when the workshop was conducted, multi-modal summarization was merely an agglomeration of yet-to-be-developed technologies that had not yet been fully synthesized. Rather than sharing a task, the MuST workshop shared a data set. Making an annotated corpus shared as its unifying force, the workshop encouraged cooperative and competitive researches on trend information. Several innovations emerged from the workshop. These covered trend information extraction, visualization as information access interface and as data analysis method, linguistic summary generation from charts, and trend mining.