An information-theoretic approach to automatic evaluation of summaries

  • Authors:
  • Chin-Yew Lin;Guihong Cao;Jianfeng Gao;Jian-Yun Nie

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, CA;Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada;Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA;Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada

  • Venue:
  • HLT-NAACL '06 Proceedings of the main conference on Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Until recently there are no common, convenient, and repeatable evaluation methods that could be easily applied to support fast turn-around development of automatic text summarization systems. In this paper, we introduce an information-theoretic approach to automatic evaluation of summaries based on the Jensen-Shannon divergence of distributions between an automatic summary and a set of reference summaries. Several variants of the approach are also considered and compared. The results indicate that JS divergence-based evaluation method achieves comparable performance with the common automatic evaluation method ROUGE in single documents summarization task; while achieves better performance than ROUGE in multiple document summarization task.