A Bottom-Up Approach to Sentence Ordering for Multi-Document Summarization

Ordering information is a difficult but important task for applications generating natural-language text. We present a bottom-up approach to arranging sentences extracted for multi-document summarization. To capture the association and order of two textual segments (eg, sentences), we define four criteria, chronology, topical-closeness, precedence, and succession. These criteria are integrated into a criterion by a supervised learning approach. We repeatedly concatenate two textual segments into one segment based on the criterion until we obtain the overall segment with all sentences arranged. Our experimental results show a significant improvement over existing sentence ordering strategies.