Using Background Information for Multi-document Summarization and Summaries in Response to a Question

In our second participation to the DUC evaluation, we used the SumUM system for the multidocument summarization focused by events task and summaries in response to a question task. Our multi-document summarization algorithm is based on the use of background information gathered by summarizing previous texts, which is then combined with a new document of the cluster. For producing the summaries to answer a question, we used a similar technique applied on passages retrieval using Okapi.