Web content summarization using social bookmarks: A new approach for social summarization

An increasing number of Web applications are allowing users to play more active roles for enriching the source content. The enriched data can be used for various applications such as text summarization, opinion mining and ontology creation. In this paper, we propose a novel Web content summarization method that creates a text summary by exploiting user feedback (comments and tags) in a social bookmarking service. We had manually analyzed user feedback in several representative social services including del.icio.us, Digg, YouTube, and Amazon.com. We found that (1) user comments in each social service have its own characteristics with respect to summarization, and (2) a tag frequency rank does not necessarily represent its usefulness for summarization. Based on these observations, we conjecture that user feedback in social bookmarking services is more suitable for summarization than other type of social services. We implemented prototype system called SSNote that analyzes tags and user comments in del.icio.us, and extracts summaries. Performance evaluations of the system were conducted by comparing its output summary with manual summaries generated by human evaluators. Experimental results show that our approach highlights the potential benefits of user feedback in social bookmarking services.