Creating and Evaluating Multi-Document Sentence Extract Summaries

Abstract

This paper discusses passage extraction approaches to multidocument summarization that use available information about the document set as a whole and the relationships between the documents to build on single document summarization methodology. Multi-document summarization differs from single in that the issues of compression, speed, redundancy and passage selection are critical in the formation of useful summaries, as well as the user's goals in creating the summary. Our approach addresses these issues by using domain-independent techniques based mainly on fast, statistical processing, a metric for reducing redundancy and maximizing diversity in the selected passages, and a modular framework to allow easy parameterization for different genres, corpora characteristics and user requirements. We examined how humans create multi-document summaries as well as the characteristics of such summaries and use these summaries to evaluate the performance of various multidocument summarization algorithms.