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.

Query-sensitive mutual reinforcement chain and its application in query-oriented multi-document summarization

Abstract: Sentence ranking is the issue of most concern in document summarization. Early researchers have presented the mutual reinforcement principle (MR) between sentence and term for simultaneous key phrase and salient sentence extraction in generic single-document summarization. In this work, we extend the MR to the mutual reinforcement chain (MRC) of three different text granularities, i.e., document, sentence and terms. The aim is to provide a general reinforcement framework and a formal mathematical modeling for the MRC. Going one step further, we incorporate the query influence into the MRC to cope with the need for query-oriented multi-document summarization. While the previous summarization approaches often calculate the similarity regardless of the query, we develop a query-sensitive similarity to measure the affinity between the pair of texts. When evaluated on the DUC 2005 dataset, the experimental results suggest that the proposed query-sensitive MRC (Qs-MRC) is a promising approach for summarization.

Sentence ordering in multidocument summarization

Abstract: The problem of organizing information for multidocument summarization so that the generated summary is coherent has received relatively little attention. In this paper, we describe two naive ordering techniques and show that they do not perform well. We present an integrated strategy for ordering information, combining constraints from chronological order of events and cohesion. This strategy was derived from empirical observations based on experiments asking humans to order information. Evaluation of our augmented algorithm shows a significant improvement of the ordering over the two naive techniques we used as baseline.

Cross-document summarization by concept classification

Abstract: In this paper we describe a Cross Document Summarizer XDoX designed specifically to summarize large document sets (50-500 documents and more). Such sets of documents are typically obtained from routing or filtering systems run against a continuous stream of data, such as a newswire. XDoX works by identifying the most salient themes within the set (at the granularity level that is regulated by the user) and composing an extraction summary, which reflects these main themes. In the current version, XDoX is not optimized to produce a summary based on a few unrelated documents; indeed, such summaries are best obtained simply by concatenating summaries of individual documents. We show examples of summaries obtained in our tests as well as from our participation in the first Document Understanding Conference (DUC).

Multilingual Summarization Evaluation without Human Models

Abstract: We study correlation of rankings of text summarization systems using evaluation methods with and without human models. We apply our comparison framework to various well-established content-based evaluation measures in text summarization such as coverage, Responsiveness, Pyramids and Rouge studying their associations in various text summarization tasks including generic and focus-based multi-document summarization in English and generic single-document summarization in French and Spanish. The research is carried out using a new content-based evaluation framework called Fresa to compute a variety of divergences among probability distributions.

Adapting the Neural Encoder-Decoder Framework from Single to Multi-Document Summarization

Abstract: Generating a text abstract from a set of documents remains a challenging task. The neural encoder-decoder framework has recently been exploited to summarize single documents, but its success can in part be attributed to the availability of large parallel data automatically acquired from the Web. In contrast, parallel data for multi-document summarization are scarce and costly to obtain. There is a pressing need to adapt an encoder-decoder model trained on single-document summarization data to work with multiple-document input. In this paper, we present an initial investigation into a novel adaptation method. It exploits the maximal marginal relevance method to select representative sentences from multi-document input, and leverages an abstractive encoder-decoder model to fuse disparate sentences to an abstractive summary. The adaptation method is robust and itself requires no training data. Our system compares favorably to state-of-the-art extractive and abstractive approaches judged by automatic metrics and human assessors.