Linguistic summarisation of multiple entities in RDF graphs

Abstract

Methods for producing summaries from structured data have gained interest due to the huge volume of available data in the Web. Simultaneously, there have been advances in natural language generation from Resource Description Framework (RDF) data. However, no efforts have been made to generate natural language summaries for groups of multiple RDF entities. This paper describes the first algorithm for summarising the information of a set of RDF entities in the form of human-readable text. The paper also proposes an experimental design for the evaluation of the summaries in a human task context. Experiments were carried out comparing machine-made summaries and summaries written by humans, with and without the help of machine-made summaries. We develop criteria for evaluating the content and text quality of summaries of both types, as well as a function measuring the agreement between machine-made and human-written summaries. The experiments indicated that machine-made natural language summaries can substantially help humans in writing their own textual descriptions of entity sets within a limited time.