Toward a Unified Framework for Standard and Update Multi-Document Summarization

Abstract

This article presents a unified framework for extracting standard and update summaries from a set of documents. In particular, a topic modeling approach is employed for salience determination and a dynamic modeling approach is proposed for redundancy control. In the topic modeling approach for salience determination, we represent various kinds of text units, such as word, sentence, document, documents, and summary, using a single vector space model via their corresponding probability distributions over the inherent topics of given documents or a related corpus. Therefore, we are able to calculate the similarity between any two text units via their topic probability distributions. In the dynamic modeling approach for redundancy control, we consider the similarity between the summary and the given documents, and the similarity between the sentence and the summary, besides the similarity between the sentence and the given documents, for standard summarization while for update summarization, we also consider the similarity between the sentence and the history documents or summary. Evaluation on TAC 2008 and 2009 in English language shows encouraging results, especially the dynamic modeling approach in removing the redundancy in the given documents. Finally, we extend the framework to Chinese multi-document summarization and experiments show the effectiveness of our framework.