Seeing the Whole in Parts: Text Summarization for Web Browsing on Handheld Devices

Abstract

We introduce five methods for summarizing parts of Web pages on handheld devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), or cellular phones. Each Web page is broken into text units that can each be hidden, partially displayed, made fully visible, or summarized. The methods accomplish summarization by different means. One method extracts significant keywords from the text units, another attempts to find each text unit's most significant sentence to act as a summary for the unit. We use information retrieval techniques, which we adapt to the World-Wide Web context. We tested the relative performance of our five methods by asking human subjects to accomplish single-page information search tasks using each method. We found that the combination of keywords and single-sentence summaries works best for a variety of search tasks.