Focused multi-document summarization: Human summarization activity vs. automated systems techniques

Focused Multi-Document Summarization (MDS) is concerned with summarizing documents in a collection with a concentration toward a particular external request (i.e. query, question, topic, etc.), or focus. Although the current state-of-the-art provides somewhat decent performance for DUC/TAC-like evaluations (i.e. government and news concerns), other considerations need to be explored. This paper not only briefly explores the state-of-the-art in automatic systems techniques, but also a comparison with human summarization activity.