Multi-Document Summarization By Visualizing Topical Content

This paper describes a framework for multidocument summarization which combines three premises: coherent themes can be identified reliably; highly representative themes, running across subsets of the document collection, can function as multi-document summary surrogates; and effective end-use of such themes should be facilitated by a visualization environment which clarifies the relationship between themes and documents. We present algorithms that formalize our framework, describe an implementation, and demonstrate a prototype system and interface.