Text summarization through entailment-based minimum vertex cover

Abstract

Sentence Connectivity is a textual characteristic that may be incorporated intelligently for the selection of sentences of a well meaning summary. However, the existing summarization methods do not utilize its potential fully. The present paper introduces a novel method for singledocument text summarization. It poses the text summarization task as an optimization problem, and attempts to solve it using Weighted Minimum Vertex Cover (WMVC), a graph-based algorithm. Textual entailment, an established indicator of semantic relationships between text units, is used to measure sentence connectivity and construct the graph on which WMVC operates. Experiments on a standard summarization dataset show that the suggested algorithm outperforms related methods.