Evaluation of term utility functions for very short multidocument summaries

We describe results from an application for relevance assessment in a setting related to multi-document summarization. For the task of characterizing given document collections by a short list of relevant terms, we have proposed the term utility function PxR. The measure is competitive to a variety of utility functions commonly used in text mining. Our function incorporates a user-definable parameter which allows for explicit, continuous trade-off between precision and recall, which was preferred by our users over the more opaque term utility functions from text mining. The Fβ measure is similar but not identical to our measure and will also be discussed. Despite our users’ preference for a user-definable parameter, the improvement by setting different user-defined parameter values for each document collection are limited, and a static value for the parameter works almost as well. This seems to be true for the Fβ measure as well. A simple measure, SR, also performs competitively. In light of this evidence, a user-definable parameter seems to be unnecessary to achieve competitive performance.