Trade-Off between Factors Influencing Quality of the Summary

Our summarization approach is based on the assumption that quality of the summary is influenced by a set of factors, dependent on lexical and grammatical features of text units selected and arranged while composing the summary. The system has been developed with taking into account six factors influencing the final quality: compliance with the genre "summary", relevance, focusing, compliance with the requested granularity, topic coverage, and cohesion-based ordering. Preliminary selected text units get positive or negative scores depending on the relative impact of features that are responsible for the respective factors. Balancing the impacts of different text features was performed on empirical basis. After initial ranking of text units by the first four factors, they are ordered so that to achieve higher coverage and cohesion. The top-ranked passages, whose total words number does not exceed the required size, are submitted as the resulting summary.