News Editorials: Towards Summarizing Long Argumentative Texts
Shahbaz Syed, Roxanne El Baff, Johannes Kiesel, Khalid Al‐Khatib, Benno Stein, Martin Potthast · 2020
The automatic summarization of argumentative texts has hardly been explored.This paper takes a further step in this direction, targeting news editorials, i.e., opinionated articles with a well-defined argumentation structure.With Webis-EditorialSum-2020, we present a corpus of 1330 carefully curated summaries for 266 news editorials.We evaluate these summaries based on a tailored annotation scheme, where a high-quality summary is expected to be thesis-indicative, persuasive, reasonable, concise, and self-contained.Our corpus contains at least three high-quality summaries for about 90% of the editorials, rendering it a valuable resource for the development and evaluation of summarization technology for long argumentative texts.We further report details of both, an in-depth corpus analysis, and the evaluation of two extractive summarization models.