Digesting Virtual “Geek” Culture: The Summarization of Technical Internet Relay Chats

This paper describes a summarization system for technical chats and emails on the Linux kernel. To reflect the complexity and sophistication of the discussions, they are clustered according to subtopic structure on the sub-message level, and immediate responding pairs are identified through machine learning methods. A resulting summary consists of one or more mini-summaries, each on a subtopic from the discussion.