Applying regression models to query-focused multi-document summarization

  • Authors:

  • You Ouyang;Wenjie Li;Sujian Li;Qin Lu

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong;Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong;Key Laboratory of Computational Linguistics, Peking University, Ministry of Education, China;Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

  • Venue:
  • Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Most existing research on applying machine learning techniques to document summarization explores either classification models or learning-to-rank models. This paper presents our recent study on how to apply a different kind of learning models, namely regression models, to query-focused multi-document summarization. We choose to use Support Vector Regression (SVR) to estimate the importance of a sentence in a document set to be summarized through a set of pre-defined features. In order to learn the regression models, we propose several methods to construct the ''pseudo'' training data by assigning each sentence with a ''nearly true'' importance score calculated with the human summaries that have been provided for the corresponding document set. A series of evaluations on the DUC data sets are conducted to examine the efficiency and the robustness of the proposed approaches. When compared with classification models and ranking models, regression models are consistently preferable.