Finding topic words for hierarchical summarization

  • Authors:
  • Dawn Lawrie;W. Bruce Croft;Arnold Rosenberg

  • Affiliations:
  • Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst;Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst;Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 24th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Hierarchies have long been used for organization, summarization, and access to information. In this paper we define summarization in terms of a probabilistic language model and use the definition to explore a new technique for automatically generating topic hierarchies by applying a graph-theoretic algorithm, which is an approximation of the Dominating Set Problem. The algorithm efficiently chooses terms according to a language model. We compare the new technique to previous methods proposed for constructing topic hierarchies including subsumption and lexical hierarchies, as well as the top TF.IDF terms. Our results show that the new technique consistently performs as well as or better than these other techniques. They also show the usefulness of hierarchies compared with a list of terms.