Exploiting Cross-Document Relations for Multi-Document Evolving Summarization

Title: Exploiting Cross-Document Relations for Multi-Document Evolving Summarization

Research Question: How can we develop a methodology for summarizing multiple documents that are related to a specific topic by identifying and utilizing the cross-document relations between them?

Methodology:

1. Specify and Identify Topic-Specific Entities: The first step is to identify the entities or topics that are being discussed in the documents. These entities can be nouns, names, or any other words that are relevant to the topic.

2. Identify Messages Conveyed by Entities: Next, we need to determine the messages or ideas that are being conveyed by these entities. This can be done by analyzing the context in which the entities appear and the relationships they have with other entities.

3. Specify Relations Between Messages: Once we have identified the messages conveyed by the entities, we can then specify the relations between these messages. These relations can be based on the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) or other similar theories.

4. Query-Based Summarization: Using the identified entities, messages, and relations, we can create a summarization model that can identify the query-specific messages within the documents and the query-specific relations that connect these messages across documents.

Results:

The research team conducted an experiment to test the effectiveness of their methodology. The experiment involved 9 subjects who were asked to read a set of news articles and write down the cross-document relations they observed. The results of the experiment showed that the inter-judge agreement was very low, and only a small subset of the proposed relations was used by the judges.

Implications:

Despite the low inter-judge agreement in the experiment, the research team believes that their methodology has the potential to improve the quality of multi-document summarization. They plan to continue refining their approach and conducting further experiments to validate their findings.

In conclusion, the research team has proposed a methodology for summarizing multiple documents related to a specific topic by identifying and utilizing the cross-document relations between them. Their approach involves specifying and identifying topic-specific entities, identifying messages conveyed by these entities, specifying relations between messages, and using these relations to create a query-based summarization model. While further research is needed to validate the effectiveness of their methodology, the preliminary results show promise for improving the quality of multi-document summarization.

Link to Article: https://arxiv.org/abs/0404049v1 Authors: arXiv ID: 0404049v1