Readable and Coherent MultiDocument Summarization

Extractive summarization is the process of precisely choosing a set of sentences from a corpus which can actually be a representative of the original corpus in a limited space. In addition to exhibiting a good content coverage, the final summary should be readable as well as structurally and topically coherent. In this paper we present a holistic, multi-document summarization approach which takes care of the content coverage, sentence ordering, maintenance of topical coherence, topical order and inter-sentence structural relationships. To achieve this we have introduced a novel concept of a Local Coherent Unit(LCU). Our results are comparable with the peer systems for content coverage and sentence ordering measured in terms of ROUGE and τ score respectively. The human evaluation preference for readability and coherence of summary are significantly better for our approach vis a vis other approaches. The approach is scalable to bigger realtime corpus as well.