  Automatic text summarization has enjoyed great progress over the last years.
Now is the time to re-assess its focus and objectives. Does the current focus
fully adhere to users' desires or should we expand or change our focus? We
investigate this question empirically by conducting a survey amongst heavy
users of pre-made summaries. We find that the current focus of the field does
not fully align with participants' wishes. In response, we identify three
groups of implications. First, we argue that it is important to adopt a broader
perspective on automatic summarization. Based on our findings, we illustrate
how we can expand our view when it comes to the types of input material that is
to be summarized, the purpose of the summaries and their potential formats.
Second, we define requirements for datasets that can facilitate these research
directions. Third, usefulness is an important aspect of summarization that
should be included in our evaluation methodology; we propose a methodology to
evaluate the usefulness of a summary. With this work we unlock important
research directions for future work on automatic summarization and we hope to
initiate the development of methods in these directions.
