Ontology-enriched multi-document summarization in disaster management using submodular function

Abstract

In disaster management, a myriad of news and reports relevant to the disaster may be recorded in the form of text document. A challenging problem is how to provide concise and informative reports from a large collection of documents, to help domain experts analyze the trend of the disaster. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of using a domain-specific ontology to facilitate the summarization task, and propose TELESUM, an ontology-enriched multi-document summarization approach, where the submodularity hidden in among ontological concepts is investigated. Empirical experiments on the collection of press releases by Miami-Dade County Department of Emergency Management during Hurricane Wilma in 2005 demonstrate the efficacy and effectiveness of TELESUM in disaster management. Further, our proposed framework can be extended to summarizing general documents by employing public ontologies, e.g., Wikipedia. Extensive evaluation on the generalized framework is conducted on DUC04-05 datasets, and shows that our method is competitive with other approaches.