Selecting text spans for document summaries: heuristics and metrics

  • Authors:
  • Vibhu Mittal;Mark Kantrowitz;Jade Goldstein;Jaime Carbonell

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • AAAI '99/IAAI '99 Proceedings of the sixteenth national conference on Artificial intelligence and the eleventh Innovative applications of artificial intelligence conference innovative applications of artificial intelligence
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Human-quality text summarization systems are difficult to design, and even more difficult to evaluate, in part because documents can differ along several dimensions, such as length, writing style and lexical usage. Nevertheless, certain cues can often help suggest the selection of sentences for inclusion in a summary. This paper presents an analysis of news-article summaries generated by sentence extraction. Sentences are ranked for potential inclusion in the summary using a weighted combination of linguistic features - derived from an analysis of news-wire summaries. This paper evaluates the relative effectiveness of these features. In order to do so, we discuss the construction of a large corpus of extraction-based summaries, and characterize the underlying degree of difficulty of summarization at different compression levels on articles in this corpus. Results on our feature set are presented after normalization by this degree of difficulty.