Summarization of an online medical encyclopedia.

We explore a knowledge-rich (abstraction) approach to summarization and apply it to multiple documents from an online medical encyclopedia. A semantic processor functions as the source interpreter and produces a list of predications. A transformation stage then generalizes and condenses this list, ultimately generating a conceptual condensate for a given disorder topic. We provide a preliminary evaluation of the quality of the condensates produced for a sample of four disorders. The overall precision of the disorder conceptual condensates was 87%, and the compression ratio from the base list of predications to the final condensate was 98%. The conceptual condensate could be used as input to a text generator to produce a natural language summary for a given disorder topic.