The DUC summarization evaluations

There has been a long history of research in text summarization by both the text retrieval and the natural language processing communities, but evaluation of this research has always presented problems. In 2001 NIST launched a new text summarization evaluation effort, guided by a roadmap from the research community and sponsored by the DARPA TIDES project. This paper is a report of the first formal evaluation in a new conference called the Document Understanding Conference (DUC).