Abstract
This paper describes the evaluation of a new automated text summarization system, Centrifuser. This system provides information to patients and families relevant to their specific health questions. Centrifuser accepts queries about health conditions, and produces a summary of information from articles retrieved by a standard search engine that is tailored to the user's question. The evaluation involved audio- and video-recording of all subject interactions with the interfaces in situ at a hospital. Subjects, consisting of friends or family of hospitalized patients, were asked to “think aloud” as they interacted with Centrifuser and three commonly used search engines: Google, Yahoo, and About.com. Results of the evaluation show that subjects found Centrifuser's summarization capability useful and easy to understand. In comparing Centrifuser to the three search engines, subjects' ratings varied; however, specific interface features were deemed useful across interfaces. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for engineering Web-based retrieval systems.
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