Developing Guidelines for Summarizing Information

Abstract

This study was conducted to test the validity and generalizability of previously developed guidelines for summarizing military message content. The task required staff officers to summarize a set of tactical messages; these summaries were then evaluated by knowledgeable raters. An analysis of the contents of the summaries reflected positively on the guidelines, and the raters judged the individual summaries prepared with the aid of the guidelines to be significantly "better" summaries than those prepared without guidelines. In addition, the 10 summaries that received the highest overall evaluations were used to derive a general suggested outline, or "schema," for describing the message content. This schema differed from another schema, derived from summaries of a different set of messages, only in terms of the inferences drawn from the intelligence data.