A User Study on Snippet Generation: Text Reuse vs. Paraphrases

Wei-Fan Chen, Matthias Hagen, Benno Stein, Martin Potthast

Abstract: The snippets in the result list of a web search engine are built with sentences from the retrieved web pages that match the query. Reusing a web page's text for snippets has been considered fair use under the copyright laws of most jurisdictions. As of recent, notable exceptions from this arrangement include Germany and Spain, where news publishers are entitled to raise claims under a so-called ancillary copyright. A similar legislation is currently discussed at the European Commission. If this development gains momentum, the reuse of text for snippets will soon incur costs, which in turn will give rise to new solutions for generating truly original snippets. A key question in this regard is whether the users will accept any new approach for snippet generation, or whether they will prefer the current model of "reuse snippets." The paper in hand gives a first answer. A crowdsourcing experiment along with a statistical analysis reveals that our test users exert no significant preference for either kind of snippet. Notwithstanding the technological difficulty, this result opens the door to a new snippet synthesis paradigm.