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<Paper uid="W96-0512">
  <Title>An Architecture For Distributed Natural Language Summarization</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="45" end_page="45" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 SUMMONS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Our choice of domain was dictated by the existence of two Message Understanding Conferences (MUC) organized by DARPA \[Sundheim 1992\] in the domain of terrorism in Latin America. The participants were asked to fill templates (as shown in Figure 1) with information extracted from news articles. We parsed the templates (Figure 2), adding information about the primary and secondary sources of news 1.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> SUMMONS (SUMMarizing Online NewS articles) is based on an architecture used in PLANDoc \[McKeown et al. 1994\], developed jointly by Bellcore and Columbia University.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> It consists of a content planner which decides what information is to be included in the summary, and a surface generator, based on the FUF/SURGE tools developed by Michael E1hadad \[Elhadad 1993\]. We have used SUMMONS on templates from two MUC conferences (covering events in 1988 and 1989) and on manually generated templates from recent events (e.g., the 1993 World Trade Center bombing).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> SUMMONS (Figure 3) uses summarization operators to express various ways in which the templates that are to be generated are related 1The primary source, e.g., an eyewitness, and the sec- ondary source, e.g., a news agency, are very important for producing accurate summaries to each other. We have implemented operators for Superset, Addition, Contradiction, Refine- ment, Change of Perspective, etc. The following paragraph was generated by the Change of Perspective operator on a set of two messages.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The ~.fternoon of Febru~.ry 26, 1993, Reuters re- ported that a suspected bomb killed at le&amp;st five people in  ..... oNTiooY, Ill ..... .... ' I-- I Ad~,,L** &amp;quot;'::::'&amp;quot; I: ~:::,,::J ........ i ....... .... : ....</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> c. 2 .- ....... : ......</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> ~'~ $4.~lMAiqy</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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