Using only cross-document relationships for both generic and topic-focused multi-document summarizations

摘要

In recent years graph-ranking based algorithms have been proposed for single document summarization and generic multi-document summarization. The algorithms make use of the "votings" or "recommendations" between sentences to evaluate the importance of the sentences in the documents. This study aims to differentiate the cross-document and within-document relationships between sentences for generic multi-document summarization and adapt the graph-ranking based algorithm for topic-focused summarization. The contributions of this study are two-fold: (1) For generic multi-document summarization, we apply the graph-based ranking algorithm based on each kind of sentence relationship and explore their relative importance for summarization performance. (2) For topic-focused multi-document summarization, we propose to integrate the relevance of the sentences to the specified topic into the graph-ranking based method. Each individual kind of sentence relationship is also differentiated and investigated in the algorithm. Experimental results on DUC 2002-DUC 2005 data demonstrate the great importance of the cross-document relationships between sentences for both generic and topic-focused multi-document summarizations. Even the approach based only on the cross-document relationships can perform better than or at least as well as the approaches based on both kinds of relationships between sentences.