Multi-document summarization for terrorism information extraction

Abstract

Counter-terrorism is one of the major challenges to the society. In order to flight again the terrorists, it is very important to have a through understanding of the terrorism incidents. However, it is impossible for a human to read all the information related to a terrorism incident because of the large volume of information. Summarization technique is urgently required for analysis of terrorism incident. In this work, we propose a multi-document summarization system to extract the critical information from terrorism incidents. News stories of a terrorism incident are organized into a hierarchical tree structure. Fractal summarization model is employed to generate a summary for all the news stories. Experimental results show that our system can effectively extract the most important information for the incident. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.