Topic-Focused Summarization of Chat Conversations

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address the problem of chat summarization. We summarize real-time chat conversations which contain multiple users with frequent shifts in topic. Our approach consists of two phases. In the first phase, we leverage topic modeling using web documents to find the primary topic of discussion in the chat. Then, in the summary generation phase, we build a semantic word space to score sentences based on their association with the primary topic. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms the baseline systems on ROUGE F-scores.