Exploring Text Links for Coherent Multi-Document Summarization

Summarization aims to represent source documents by a shortened passage. Existing methods focus on the extraction of key information, but often neglect coherence. Hence the generated summaries suffer from a lack of readability. To address this problem, we have developed a graph-based method by exploring the links between text to produce coherent summaries. Our approach involves finding a sequence of sentences that best represent the key information in a coherent way. In contrast to the previous methods that focus only on salience, the proposed method addresses both coherence and informativeness based on textual linkages. We conduct experiments on the DUC2004 summarization task data set. A performance comparison reveals that the summaries generated by the proposed system achieve comparable results in terms of the ROUGE metric, and show improvements in readability by human evaluation.