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<Paper uid="C86-1061">
  <Title>TAILORING IMPORTANCE EVALUATION TO READER'S GOALS: A CONTRIBUTION TO DESCRIPTIVE TEXT SUMMARIZATION</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Importance evaluation is one of the major issues in text understanding.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Human readers, in fact, rank each new piece of information obtained from a text in a sort of importance hierarchy. The mental representation of the meaning of a text can not therefore be assumed to be fiat, objective, and reader-independent, but it generally contains a lot of subjective judgmental knowledge. Importance evaluation not only constitutes a fundamental skill in text summarizing and in related tasks (e.g., underlining, note taking, concept extraction, etc.) but, more generally, it is a prerequisite for any text understanding process.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In recent years we have been working at a new approach to importance evaluation (Fum, Guida, and Tasso, 1985a and 1985b) that is supported by the development of SUSY, an experimental system in the specific domain of descriptive text summarization. Most of the research carried out in this field has been aimed at providing a procedural definition of the concept of importance relying on both structural and semantic knowledge. In this paper we focus on how it is possible to take into account, in evaluating importance, the goals of the reader, in order to investigate how they may inflnence the evaluation process and its output. In fact, it is expected not only that different representations of the same text will be produced, but also that goals will directly affect the way importance is evaluated.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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