Description of SQUASH, the SFU Question Answering Summary Handler for the DUC-2005 Summarization Task

This paper describes the design of the SQUASH system, the SFU Question Answering Summary Handler, developed by members of the Natural Language Lab from the SFU School of Computing Science in order to participate in the 2005 Document Understanding Conference (DUC-2005) summarization task. The system design involves semantic role labelling, semantic subgraph-based sentence selection and automatic post-editing to create a question-based 250 word summary from a set of documents, all of which are relevant to the question topic. We also present and discuss the various evaluations performed on our system output, comparing our performance to the other systems that took part in the DUC 2005 competition.