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<Paper uid="C82-1013">
  <Title>FORWARD AND BACKWARD REASONING IN AUTOMATIC ABSTRACTING</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="83" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> For its theoretic and practical implications automatic abstracting has recently emerged as one of the most promising and interesting research topics in the field of natural language studies covered by computational linguistics.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> artificial intelligence, and psycholinguistics. In this paper we present the first results of a research project aimed at developing a new approach to automatic abstracting which is supported by the development of SUSY (SUmmarizing SYstem), an experimental system which is currently being implemented on VAX-11/780 at the University of Udine (Italy). The system is conceived to accept in input a natural language text (a scientific paper in the current application) together with the user's requirements and to produce as output a summary of the specified kind. SUSY relies on two basic assumptions~ - to ground parsing, summarizing, and generation activities mostly on the semantics of the language, and to avoid any kind of reasoning merely based on syntactic or structural properties which are not adequate for an intelligent and effective summarizer; - to take strongly into account recent results of psycholinguistic research (Kintsch. 1974; Kintsch and van Dijk, 1978) as a conceptual background and a valid standpoint for designing a general purpose summarizing method.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The most relevant and original features of SUSY consist, in our opinion, in the remarkable flexibility of the system which allows the user to obtain different abstracts depending on his particular goals and needs, and in the strategies used to summarize (i.e.. forward and backward processing) that simulate at a certain level of abstraction those utilized'by humans.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3">  84 D. FUM, G. GUIDA and C. TASSO</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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