PolyU at TAC 2009

PolyU has participated in both the two tasks in the TAC 2009 summarization track, including the update summarization task and the automatically evaluating summaries of peers (AESOP) task. The update summarization task is to generate short fluent multi-document summaries of news articles. For each topic, a topic statement and two chronologically ordered newswire document sets are given. The task requires generating a 100-word summary for each document set. The purpose of the AESOP task is to promote research and development of systems that automatically evaluate the quality of summaries. The automatic metrics are run on the data and submitted summarization systems from the update summarization task and compared to manual evaluations. In this year, we mainly study the word-based approaches for both tasks. Simple word-based approaches are first proposed as basic solutions. More sophisticated approaches are then studied by considering the factors beyond words. The systems are detailed in following sections.