TY - JOUR T1 - Single-document and multi-document summarization techniques for email threads using sentence compression JF - Information Processing & Management Y1 - 2008 A1 - Zajic, David A1 - Dorr, Bonnie J A1 - Jimmy Lin KW - Email summarization KW - Enron KW - Informal media KW - Sentence compression KW - Trimming AB - We present two approaches to email thread summarization: collective message summarization (CMS) applies a multi-document summarization approach, while individual message summarization (IMS) treats the problem as a sequence of single-document summarization tasks. Both approaches are implemented in our general framework driven by sentence compression. Instead of a purely extractive approach, we employ linguistic and statistical methods to generate multiple compressions, and then select from those candidates to produce a final summary. We demonstrate these ideas on the Enron email collection – a very challenging corpus because of the highly technical language. Experimental results point to two findings: that CMS represents a better approach to email thread summarization, and that current sentence compression techniques do not improve summarization performance in this genre. VL - 44 SN - 0306-4573 UR - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306457307001768 CP - 4 M3 - 10.1016/j.ipm.2007.09.007 ER -