Automatic Summarization of Privacy Policies Using Ensemble Learning

When customers purchase a product or sign up for service from a company, they often are required to agree to a Privacy Policy or Terms of Service agreement. Many of these policies are lengthy, and a typical customer agrees to them without reading them carefully if at all. To address this problem, we have developed a prototype automatic text summarization system which is specifically designed for privacy policies. Our system generates a summary of a policy statement by identifying important sentences from the statement, categorizing these sentences by which of 5 "statement categories" the sentence addresses, and displaying to a user a list of the sentences which match each category. Our system incorporates keywords identified by a human domain expert and rules that were obtained by machine learning, and they are combined in an ensemble architecture. We have tested our system on a sample corpus of privacy statements, and preliminary results are promising.