BackgroundThe position of a sentence in a document has been traditionally considered an indicator of the relevance of the sentence, and therefore it is frequently used by automatic summarization systems as an attribute for sentence selection. Sentences close to the beginning of the document are supposed to deal with the main topic and thus are selected for the summary. This criterion has shown to be very effective when summarizing some types of documents, such as news items. However, this property is not likely to be found in other types of documents, such as scientific articles, where other positional criteria may be preferred. The purpose of the present work is to study the utility of different positional strategies for biomedical literature summarization.
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