Summarising company announcements

This paper describes work that attempts to use language technology as a solution to the problem of information overload. The specific domain of application is the database of company announcements accessible via the Web site of the Australian Stock Exchange to meet regulatory requirements, over 100,000 documents a year are made available via this site, with only limited search facilities. We use a variety of techniques from language technology to make it easier to explore and manage the information in this data set. In this paper, we focus on our use of information extraction, which identifies and extracts important elements of information from a document, and text compaction, which applies linguistically-motived substitutions to reduce potential summary sentences to more compact forms. Together, these techniques provide a way of producing summaries of a significant proportion of the document base.