%0 Journal Article %J Information Processing & Management %D 2008 %T Single-document and multi-document summarization techniques for email threads using sentence compression %A Zajic, David %A Dorr, Bonnie J %A Jimmy Lin %K Email summarization %K Enron %K Informal media %K Sentence compression %K Trimming %X 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. %B Information Processing & Management %V 44 %P 1600 - 1610 %8 2008/07// %@ 0306-4573 %G eng %U http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306457307001768 %N 4 %R 10.1016/j.ipm.2007.09.007