Domain-Independent Abstract Generation for Focused Meeting Summarization

We address the challenge of generating natural language abstractive summaries for spoken meetings in a domain-independent fashion. We apply Multiple-Sequence Alignment to induce abstract generation templates that can be used for different domains. An Overgenerateand-Rank strategy is utilized to produce and rank candidate abstracts. Experiments using in-domain and out-of-domain training on disparate corpora show that our system uniformly outperforms state-of-the-art supervised extract-based approaches. In addition, human judges rate our system summaries significantly higher than compared systems in fluency and overall quality.