Automatically Characterizing Salience Using Readers' Feedback

Salience is an important characteristic of information influencing users’ cognitive and emotional states. For example, salient parts of a document are those that readers will find moving or provoking. This article analyzes the main characteristics of salience and the different meanings of the concept in information retrieval and linguistics. It also presents a generic approach for identifying linguistically salient segments in a text using readers’ textual feedback. The method supports any kind of text and textual feedback. We evaluated the effectiveness of the method with a corpus of blog posts and readers’ comments. Our preliminary experiments show that the method has promising results with an fscore of 0.65. The method could also be used on 90% of commented posts which proves that it can be used on a large scale. Key-words: Salience, Information Retrieval, Feedback