Evaluating Multilingual Gisting of Web Pages

This evaJuation paradigm is straightforward, rigorous, permits fair comparison of alternative approaches, and should easily generalize to evaluation in other situations where the user is faced with decision-making on the basis of information in restricted or alternative form.

Abstract

We describe a prototype system for multilingual gisting of Web pages, and present an evaluation methodology based on the notion of gisting as decision support. This evaluation paradigm is straightforward, rigorous, permits fair comparison of alternative approaches, and should easily generalize to evaluation in other situations where the user is faced with decision-making on the basis of information in restricted or alternative form. Introduction: Gisting as Decision Support The word "gisting" has been used in a variety of settings. Informally, it simply means "getting the gist," that is, given some information conveyed by natural language, understanding some characteristic or important aspect of that information. By definition, gisting is an activity in which the information taken into account is less than the full information content available. In this paper, we take the view that there is another key aspect of gisting that goes beyond simply selecting a subset of available informati...