On macro- and micro-level information in multiple documents and its influence on summarization

Jiaming Zhan, Han Tong Loh and Ying Liu

International Journal of Information Management, 2009, vol. 29, issue 1, 57-66

Abstract: A well-known challenge for multi-document summarization (MDS) is that a single best or “gold standard” summary does not exist, i.e. it is often difficult to secure a consensus among reference summaries written by different authors. It therefore motivates us to study what the “important information” is in multiple input documents that will guide different authors in writing a summary. In this paper, we propose the notions of macro- and micro-level information. Macro-level information refers to the salient topics shared among different input documents, while micro-level information consists of different sentences that act as elaborating or provide complementary details for those salient topics. Experimental studies were conducted to examine the influence of macro- and micro-level information on summarization and its evaluation. Results showed that human subjects highly relied on macro-level information when writing a summary. The length allowed for summaries is the leading factor that affects the summary agreement. Meanwhile, our summarization evaluation approach based on the proposed macro- and micro-structure information also suggested that micro-level information offered complementary details for macro-level information. We believe that both levels of information form the “important information” which affects the modeling and evaluation of automatic summarization systems.

Keywords: Multi-document summarization; Document structure analysis; Summarization evaluation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ininma:v:29:y:2009:i:1:p:57-66

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2008.04.011

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