We all encounter many documents on a daily basis that we do not have time to process in their entirety. Nevertheless, we lack good tools to rapidly skim and identify key information from within such documents. This paper develops and evaluates Interactive Compression (IC) techniques that allow users to dynamically configure the amount of information they view in a document, e.g. by automatically removing unimportant information from view (Excision) or by making important information more salient (Highlighting). We explore IC techniques in the context of meeting transcripts that are typically unstructured - making it difficult to isolate relevant regions and extract key information. We demonstrate the superiority of IC compared with an unmodified text control. In contrast to traditional summaries, our results show extensive use of interactive, as opposed to fixed compression level, summarization. They also show the value of word- as opposed to utterance-based compression. There are also trade-offs between different IC designs. Excision allows users to scan documents faster than Highlighting but at the expense of overlooking relevant sections of the document.
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