Multi-document summarization

About: Multi-document summarization is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2270 publications have been published within this topic receiving 71850 citations.

Towards multidocument summarization by reformulation: progress and prospects

Abstract: By synthesizing information common to retrieved documents, multi-document summarization can help users of information retrieval systems to find relevant documents with a minimal amount of reading. We are developing a multidocument summarization system to automatically generate a concise summary by identifying and synthesizing similarities across a set of related documents. Our approach is unique in its integration of machine learning and statistical techniques to identify similar paragraphs, intersection of similar phrases within paragraphs, and language generation to reformulate the wording of the summary. Our evaluation of system components shows that learning over multiple extracted linguistic features is more effective than information retrieval approaches at identifying similar text units for summarization and that it is possible to generate a fluent summary that conveys similarities among documents even when full semantic interpretations of the input text are not available.

A Language Independent Algorithm for Single and Multiple Document Summarization

Abstract: This paper discusses a language independent algorithm for single and multiple document summarization.

Extracting knowledge from evaluative text

Abstract: Capturing knowledge from free-form evaluative texts about an entity is a challenging task. New techniques of feature extraction, polarity determination and strength evaluation have been proposed. Feature extraction is particularly important to the task as it provides the underpinnings of the extracted knowledge. The work in this paper introduces an improved method for feature extraction that draws on an existing unsupervised method. By including user-specific prior knowledge of the evaluated entity, we turn the task of feature extraction into one of term similarity by mapping crude (learned) features into a user-defined taxonomy of the entity's features. Results show promise both in terms of the accuracy of the mapping as well as the reduction in the semantic redundancy of crude features.

Web-page classification through summarization

Abstract: Web-page classification is much more difficult than pure-text classification due to a large variety of noisy information embedded in Web pages. In this paper, we propose a new Web-page classification algorithm based on Web summarization for improving the accuracy. We first give empirical evidence that ideal Web-page summaries generated by human editors can indeed improve the performance of Web-page classification algorithms. We then propose a new Web summarization-based classification algorithm and evaluate it along with several other state-of-the-art text summarization algorithms on the LookSmart Web directory. Experimental results show that our proposed summarization-based classification algorithm achieves an approximately 8.8% improvement as compared to pure-text-based classification algorithm. We further introduce an ensemble classifier using the improved summarization algorithm and show that it achieves about 12.9% improvement over pure-text based methods.

Multi-document summarization by maximizing informative content-words

Abstract: We show that a simple procedure based on maximizing the number of informative content-words can produce some of the best reported results for multi-document summarization. We first assign a score to each term in the document cluster, using only frequency and position information, and then we find the set of sentences in the document cluster that maximizes the sum of these scores, subject to length constraints. Our overall results are the best reported on the DUC-2004 summarization task for the ROUGE-1 score, and are the best, but not statistically significantly different from the best system in MSE-2005. Our system is also substantially simpler than the previous best system.