Summarizing the differences in multilingual news

  • Authors:
  • Xiaojun Wan;Houping Jia;Shanshan Huang;Jianguo Xiao

  • Affiliations:
  • Peking University, Beijing, China;Peking University, Beijing, China;Peking University, Beijing, China;Peking University, Beijing, China

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 34th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in Information Retrieval
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

There usually exist many news articles written in different languages about a hot news event. The news articles in different languages are written in different ways to reflect different standpoints. For example, the Chinese news agencies and the Western news agencies have published many articles to report the same news of "Liu Xiaobo's Nobel Prize" in Chinese and English languages, respectively. The Chinese news articles and the English news articles share something about the news fact in common, but they focus on different aspects in order to reflect different standpoints about the event. In this paper, we investigate the task of multilingual news summarization for the purpose of finding and summarizing the major differences between the news articles about the same event in the Chinese and English languages. We propose a novel constrained co-ranking (C-CoRank) method for addressing this special task. The C-CoRank method adds the constraints between the difference score and the common score of each sentence to the co-ranking process. Evaluation results on the manually labeled test set with 15 news topics show the effectiveness of our proposed method, and the constrained co-ranking method can outperform a few baselines and the typical co-ranking method.