Authority and priority signals in automatic summary generation for online reputation management

Online reputation management (ORM) comprises the collection of techniques that help monitoring and improving the public image of an entity (companies, products, institutions) on the Internet. The ORM experts try to minimize the negative impact of the information about an entity while maximizing the positive material for being more trustworthy to the customers. Due to the huge amount of information that is published on the Internet every day, there is a need to summarize the entire flow of information to obtain only those data that are relevant to the entities. Traditionally the automatic summarization task in the ORM scenario takes some in-domain signals into account such as popularity, polarity for reputation and novelty but exists other feature to be considered, the authority of the people. This authority depends on the ability to convince others and therefore to influence opinions. In this work, we propose the use of authority signals that measures the influence of a user jointly with (a) priority signals related to the ORM domain and (b) information regarding the different topics that influential people is talking about. Our results indicate that the use of authority signals may significantly improve the quality of the summaries that are automatically generated.