ReClose: web page summarization combining summary techniques

Search engine users are faced with long lists of search results, each entry being of a varying degree of relevance. Often users' expectations based on the short text of a search result hold false expectations about the linked web page. This leads users to skip relevant information, missing valuable insights, and click on irrelevant web pages wasting time. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new summary generation technique, ReClose, which combines query‐independent and query‐biased summary techniques to improve the accuracy of users' expectations.

The authors tested the effectiveness of ReClose summaries against Google summaries by surveying 34 participants. Participants were randomly assigned to use one type of summary approach. Summary effectiveness was judged based on the accuracy of each user's expectations.

It was found that individuals using ReClose summaries showed a 10 per cent increase in the expectation accuracy over individuals using Google summaries, and therefore better user satisfaction.

The survey demonstrates the effectiveness of using ReClose summaries to improve the accuracy of user expectations.

This paper presents a novel summary generation technique called ReClose, a new approach to summary evaluation and improvements upon previously proposed summary generation techniques.