Conveying implicit content in narrative summaries

Abstract

One of the key characteristics of any summary is that it must be concise. To achieve this the content of the summary (1) must be focused on the key events, and (2) should leave out any information that the audience can infer on their own. We have recently begun a project on summarizing simple narrative stories. In our approach, we assume that the focus of the story has already been determined and is explicitly given in the story's long-term representation; we concentrate instead on how one can plan what inferences an audience will be able to make when they read a summary. Our conclusion is that one should think about inferences as following from the audience's recognition of the central concepts in the story's plot, and then plan the textual structure of the summary so as to reinforce that recognition.