Extractive single-document summarization based on genetic operators and guided local search

Abstract

Due to the exponential growth of textual information available on the Web, end users need to be able to access information in summary form – and without losing the most important information in the document when generating the summaries. Automatic generation of extractive summaries from a single document has traditionally been given the task of extracting the most relevant sentences from the original document. The methods employed generally allocate a score to each sentence in the document, taking into account certain features. The most relevant sentences are then selected, according to the score obtained for each sentence. These features include the position of the sentence in the document, its similarity to the title, the sentence length, and the frequency of the terms in the sentence. However, it has still not been possible to achieve a quality of summary that matches that performed by humans and therefore methods continue to be brought forward that aim to improve on the results. This paper addresses the generation of extractive summaries from a single document as a binary optimization problem where the quality (fitness) of the solutions is based on the weighting of individual statistical features of each sentence – such as position, sentence length and the relationship of the summary to the title, combined with group features of similarity between candidate sentences in the summary and the original document, and among the candidate sentences of the summary. This paper proposes a method of extractive single-document summarization based on genetic operators and guided local search, called MA-SingleDocSum. A memetic algorithm is used to integrate the own-population-based search of evolutionary algorithms with a guided local search strategy. The proposed method was compared with the state of the art methods UnifiedRank, DE, FEOM, NetSum, CRF, QCS, SVM, and Manifold Ranking, using ROUGE measures on the datasets DUC2001 and DUC2002. The results showed that MA-SingleDocSum outperforms the state of the art methods.