Effects of the College Major on Assessments of Arabic Text Summaries

We set out to discover whether or not the summaries produced by our Arabic text summarization software were potentially useful to a wide range of people. 1200 students at the University of Jordan were each given a copy of a newspaper article and a system-generated summary and asked to classify the summary as Rejected (R), Not-Related (N), Satisfactory (S), Good (G) or Accepted (A). 76.92% of the summaries were judged to be G or A and 92.34% were judged to be S, G or A. These students came from four different majors: 300 from Arabic studies, 300 from humanities, 300 from Information Technology (IT) and 300 from a one-year program designed to help K-12 teachers to learn how to use computers effectively in the classroom. To our surprise, students from these four different majors differed significantly in their assessments; the teachers rated the summaries significantly more favourably; the IT students rated them significantly lower than did the students in Arabic and the humanitie