An approach for query-focused text summarisation for evidence based medicine

Abstract

We present an approach for extractive, query-focused, single-document summarisation of medical text. Our approach utilises a combination of target-sentence-specific and target-sentence-independent statistics derived from a corpus specialised for summarisation in the medical domain. We incorporate domain knowledge via the application of multiple domain-specific features, and we customise the answer extraction process for different question types. The use of carefully selected domain-specific features enables our summariser to generate content-rich extractive summaries, and an automatic evaluation of our system reveals that it outperforms other baseline and benchmark summarisation systems with a percentile rank of 96.8%. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.