Verification of Novel Summarization in Arousing Reading Interests

Young people nowadays spend less time reading books, and their reading comprehension and logical thinking skills are declining. These skills are essential for living in today’s information society. On the other hand, polls show that although young people are interested in reading, they usually think that it takes a long time to read a book continuously. The authors considered that if the reading time per book is reduced, readers would read more books and maintain their interest in reading. One way to shorten reading time is to use summarization. The authors hypothesize that summarizing the text of a novel not only shortens the reading time but also arouses interest in reading. In this paper, The authors implement a novel reading support interface with a summarizing function and test our hypothesis. The contributions of this paper includes the following two points. (1) the authors implemented a novel reading support interface with a summarizing function and tested the hypothesis. The experimental results show that the implemented interface could arouse the reader’s interest in reading a novel while maintaining the reader’s comprehension of the novel content. (2) In the validation experiment, the authors created a dataset to measure the comprehension of novels.