Dynamic Presentation of Document Content for Rapid On-Line Skimming

Present day summarisation technologies are imperfect. At a certain level of abstraction, they all work by perfomring data reduction over the original document source. In order for such summaries to be useful, it is necessary to be able to know how they relate to the documents, with suitably designed interfaces for navigation into areas of particular interest. This paper discusses the notion of strong contextualisation of document highlights, how this translates into necessary features for document analysis, and how the document abstractions derived from such principles facilitate dynamic delivery of document content. We argue that dynamic document abstractions effectively mediate different levels of granularity of analysis, from terse document highlights to fully contextualised foci of particular interest. We describe a range of dynamic document viewers which embody novel presentation metaphors for document delivery.