  The title of a document has two roles, to give a compact summary and to lead
the reader to read the document. Conventional title generation focuses on
finding key expressions from the author's wording in the document to give a
compact summary and pays little attention to the reader's interest. To make the
title play its second role properly, it is indispensable to clarify the content
(``what to say'') and wording (``how to say'') of titles that are effective to
attract the target reader's interest. In this article, we first identify
typical content and wording of titles aimed at general readers in a comparative
study between titles of technical papers and headlines rewritten for
newspapers. Next, we describe the results of a questionnaire survey on the
effects of the content and wording of titles on the reader's interest. The
survey of general and knowledgeable readers shows both common and different
tendencies in interest.

Computation and Language