Exploiting Rhetorical Relations to Multiple Documents Text Summarization

Many of previous research have proven that the usage of rhetorical relations is capable to enhance many applications such as text summarization, question answering and natural language generation. This work proposes an approach that expands the benefit of rhetorical relations to address redundancy problem for cluster-based text summarization of multiple documents. We exploited rhetorical relations exist between sentences to group similar sentences into multiple clusters to identify themes of common information. The candidate summary were extracted from these clusters. Then, cluster-based text summarization is performed using Conditional Markov Random Walk Model to measure the saliency scores of the candidate summary. We evaluated our method by measuring the cohesion and separation of the clusters constructed by exploiting rhetorical relations and ROUGE score of generated summaries. The experimental result shows that our method performed well which shows promising potential of applying rhetorical relation in text clustering which benefits text summarization of multiple documents.