The University of Michigan at DUC 2004

We present the results of Michigan’s participation in DUC 2004. Our system, MEAD, ranked as one of the top systems in four of the five tasks. We introduce our new feature, LexPageRank, a new measure of sentence centrality inspired by the prestige concept in social networks. LexPageRank gave promising results in multi-document summarization. Our approach for Task 5, biographical summarization, was simplistic, yet succesful. We used regular expression matching to boost up the scores of the sentences that are likely to contain biographical information patterns.