Modelling the Task of Summarising Time Series Data Using KA Techniques

The SumTime project aims to develop better techniques for producing natural language summaries of time-series data. The initial phase of the project has focused on understanding how human experts perform this task, via knowledge acquisition and corpus analysis exercises. This has led to a number of observations, of which the most important is that producing human like summaries involves as much processing of domain knowledge as that of communicative and linguistic knowledge. Summarisation is not simply a verbalisation of how a set of numbers changes over time. Instead it is the process in which the author adds value to the raw data using his expertise and presents exactly the information that is relevant to the end-user.