COLING 2020 Talk: News Editorials: Towards Summarizing Long Argumentative Texts
Channel: webis
Date: 2020-11-17

Title: News Editorials: Towards Summarizing Long Argumentative Texts
Authors: Shahbaz Syed, Roxanne El Baff, Khalid Al-Khatib, Johannes Kiesel, Benno Stein, and Martin Potthast
Conference: COLING 2020.
Paper: https://webis.de/publications.html#syed_2020a

Abstract:
The automatic summarization of argumentative texts has hardly been explored. This paper takes a further step in this direction, targeting news editorials, i.e., opinionated articles with a well-defined argumentation structure. With Webis-EditorialSum-2020, we present a corpus of 1330 carefully curated summaries for 266 news editorials.  We evaluate these summaries based on a tailored annotation scheme, where a high-quality summary is expected to be thesis-indicative, persuasive, reasonable, concise, and self-contained. Our corpus contains at least three high-quality summaries for about 90% of the editorials, rendering it a valuable resource for the development and evaluationof summarization technology for long argumentative texts. We further report details of both, an in-depth corpus analysis, and the evaluation of two extractive summarization models.