Sentence ordering in extractive MDS

Abstract

Ordering information is a critical task for multi-document summarization(MDS) because it heavily influent the coherence of the generated summary. In this paper, we propose a hybrid model for sentence ordering in extractive multi-document summarization that combines four relations between sentences - chronological relation, positional relation, topical relation and dependent relation. This model regards sentence as vertex and combined relation as edge of a directed graph on which the approximately optimal ordering can be generated with PageRank analysis. Evaluation of our hybrid model shows a significant improvement of the ordering over strategies losing some relations and the results also indicate that this hybrid model is robust for articles with different genre. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.