Text Summarization Challenge: An Evaluation Program for Text Summarization

In Japan, the Text Summarization Challenge (TSC), the first text summarization evaluation of its kind, was conducted in 2000–2001 as a part of the NTCIR (NII-NACSIS Test Collection for IR Systems) Workshop. The purpose of the workshop was to facilitate collecting and sharing text data for summarization by researchers in the field and to clarify the issues of evaluation measures for summarization of Japanese texts. After that, TSC has been held every 18 months as a part of the NTCIR project. In this chapter, we describe our TSC series, the data used, and the evaluation methods for each task, and the features of TSC evaluation.