Multi-Document Summarization Using a Question-Answering Engine - Yokohama National University at TSC3

Recent years, the answer-focused summarization is paid attention to as a technology complementary to information retrieval and question answering. In order to realize multi-document summarization focused by multiple questions, we propose a method to calculate sentence importance using scores produced by a Question-Answering engine in response to multiple questions. We also describe an integration of it into a generic multi-document summarization system. The evaluation results show that the proposed method has better performance than not only several baselines but also other participants’ systems in the evaluation workshop NTCIR4 TSC3 Formal Run, although we have to take notice of the fact that some of the other systems do not use the information of questions.