Provable fast greedy compressive summarization with any monotone submodular function

Abstract

Submodular maximization with the greedy algorithm has been studied as an effective approach to extractive summarization. This approach is known to have three advantages: its applicability to many useful submodular objective functions, the efficiency of the greedy algorithm, and the provable performance guarantee. However, when it comes to compressive summarization, we are currently missing a counterpart of the extractive method based on submodularity. In this paper, we propose a fast greedy method for compressive summarization. Our method is applicable to any monotone submodular objective function, including many functions well-suited for document summarization. We provide an approximation guarantee of our greedy algorithm. Experiments show that our method is about 100 to 400 times faster than an existing method based on integer-linearprogramming (ILP) formulations and that our method empirically achieves more than 95%-Approximation.