Efficient Text Summarization Costs and Benefits

Twenty-four undergraduate students were asked to read a 167-word expository text about Dutch elm disease and to write a summary of the text. Five days later, they were asked to complete a sentence-recognition task and to verbalize components of a successful text summary. Efficiency of summarization (a proportion of number of judged-important ideas to total number of words) was assessed, and high-efficient and low-efficient summarizers were compared on recognition and verbalization performance. An important finding of the study was that high-efficient students "recognized" true-to-text synthesis statements, which did not appear in the original text, far more frequently than low-efficient students, but also failed to strongly reject statements inconsistent with low-importance, in-text information. It appeared, within the study, that these students not only summarized efficiently, but also stored information in memory efficiently (i.e., in a highly streamlined, condensed manner).