Deconstructing Human Literature Reviews - A Framework for Multi-Document Summarization

This study is conducted in the area of multidocument summarization, and develops a literature review framework based on a deconstruction of human-written literature review sections in information science research papers. The first part of the study presents the results of a multi-level discourse analysis to investigate their discourse and content characteristics. These findings were incorporated into a framework for literature reviews, focusing on their macro-level document structure and the sentence-level templates, as well as the information summarization strategies. The second part of this study discusses insights from this analysis, and how the framework can be adapted to automatic summaries resembling human written literature reviews. Summaries generated from a partial implementation are evaluated against human written summaries and assessors’ comments are discussed to formulate recommendations for future work.