title: Facilitating physicians' access to information via tailored text summarization.
abstract: We have developed a summarization system, TAS (Technical Article Summarizer), which, when provided with a patient record and journal articles returned by a search, automatically generates a summary that is tailored to the patient characteristics. We hypothesize that a personalized summary will allow a physician to more quickly find information relevant to patient care. In this paper, we present a user study in which subjects carried out a task under three different conditions: using search results only, using a generic summary and search results, and using a personalized summary with search results. Our study demonstrates that subjects do a better job on task completion with the personalized summary, and show a higher level of satisfaction, than under other conditions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.
authors.forename: Noemie
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Elhadad
authors.forename: Kathleen
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: McKeown
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Kaufman
authors.forename: Desmond
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Jordan
mesh_terms: D000043:Abstracting and Indexing; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D006801:Humans; D007255:Information Services; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized; D010347:Patient Care Planning; D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D010820:Physicians; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D014584:User-Computer Interface