@article {15297, title = {Evaluating Summaries and Answers: Two Sides of the Same Coin?}, journal = {Intrinsic and Extrinsic Evaluation Measures for Machine Translation and/or Summarization}, year = {2005}, month = {2005///}, pages = {41 - 41}, abstract = {This paper discusses the convergencebetween question answering and multi- document summarization, pointing out implications and opportunities for knowl- edge transfer in both directions. As a case study in one direction, we discuss the recent development of an automatic method for evaluating definition questions based on n-gram overlap, a commonly- used technique in summarization evalua- tion. In the other direction, the move to- wards topic-oriented summaries requires an understanding of relevance and topi- cality, issues which have received atten- tion in the question answering literature. It is our opinion that question answering and multi-document summarization repre- sent two complementary approaches to the same problem of satisfying complex user information needs. Although this points to many exciting opportunities for system- building, here we primarily focus on im- plications for system evaluation. }, author = {Jimmy Lin and Demner-Fushman,D.} }