Using text summarizing to support planning of research and development

Some governmental organizations process a large number of research and development (R&D) projects simultaneously in their R&D program. For the planning of such a R&D program, decision makers can be supported by providing an overview that contains summaries of all currently running projects because they normally are not experts in all concerned R&D areas. A manual creation of such an overview is time consuming because the description of each project has been summarized in a homogeneous form. Further, each project summary has to be updated very often to consider changes within the project. Based on results of comprehensibility research, we identify a specific structure for the project summaries to ensure comprehensibility for a decision maker and usefulness for the R&D program planning. We introduce a new approach that enables a semi-automatic summarization of descriptions from R&D projects. It creates a summary in accordance to the proposed structure. A case study shows that the time taken by using the introduced approach is less than by creating a summary manually. As a result, the proposed methodology supports decision makers by planning an R&D program.