Using Collective Discourse to Generate Surveys of Scientific Paradigms

We analyze collective discourse, a collective human behavior in
content generation, and show that it exhibits diversity, a property of
general collective systems. Using extensive analysis, we propose a
novel paradigm for designing summary generation systems that reÏ ect
the diversity of perspectives seen in real-life collective
summarization.

As a concrete example of collective discourse, we will discuss
citations to scholarly work. We will show how they contain important
information that convey the key features and basic underpinnings of a
particular field, early and late developments, important
contributions, and basic definitions and examples that enable rapid
understanding of a field by non-experts. We will finally present
C-LexRank, a system that exploits scientific collective discourse to
produce automatically generated, readily consumable technical surveys.