IncreSTS: Towards Real-Time Incremental Short Text Summarization on Comment Streams from Social Network Services

Abstract

This paper focuses on the problem of short text summarization on the comment stream of a specific message from social network services (SNS). Due to the high popularity of SNS, the quantity of comments may increase at a high rate right after a social message is published. Motivated by the fact that users may desire to get a brief understanding of a comment stream without reading the whole comment list, we attempt to group comments with similar content together and generate a concise opinion summary for this message. Since distinct users will request the summary at any moment, existing clustering methods cannot be directly applied and cannot meet the real-time need of this application. In this paper, we model a novel incremental clustering problem for comment stream summarization on SNS. Moreover, we propose IncreSTS algorithm that can incrementally update clustering results with latest incoming comments in real time. Furthermore, we design an at-a-glance visualization interface to help users easily and rapidly get an overview summary. From extensive experimental results and a real case demonstration, we verify that IncreSTS possesses the advantages of high efficiency, high scalability, and better handling outliers, which justifies the practicability of IncreSTS on the target problem.