Ricerc@Sapienza

Automatic document summarization (ADS) has been introduced as a viable solution for reducing the time and the effort needed to read the ever-increasing textual content that is disseminated. However, a successful universal ADS algorithm has not yet been developed. Also, despite progress in the field, many ADS techniques do not take into account the needs of different readers, providing a summary without internal consistency and the consequent need to re-read the original document.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the cognitive interview as a pretest technique for survey questionnaires, assessing its potentials and its limits. The paper begins with a general discussion about pretest as a specific research phase in survey designs, with a focus on the main scopes of making pretest. Then, I described the main approaches to pretest, illustrating some specific pretest techniques for each approach taken into account.