CapAct: A Wordnet-Based Summarizer for Real-World Events from Microblogs

Abstract

Short messages from microblog streams often contain information about real-world events. Streams of related messages can be clustered and classified as events or non-events. Summarizing events from clusters of event related messages is a challenging task as the summary needs to be concise yet informational. We present a novel method of summarization of events from short messages. We also propose a method of creating a set of extensive reference summaries from manually created summaries for effective evaluation. We used standard ROUGE based metrics to compare the proposed summarizer with many existing baselines including a strong Hybrid-tfidf method. Our summarizer consistently outperformed others in F1-score with a margin of 11% in ROUGE-1 and 5% in ROUGE-2 over Hybrid-tfidf.