Concept-centred summarisation: producing glossary entries for terms using summarisation methods

This paper describes a novel application of automatic summarisation methods for producing glossary entries. The proposed methodology is motivated by two observations: 1) glossary entries are increasingly used, especially on the Internet; and 2) information contained in a glossary entry is, in fact, a summary of information about the concept. From these two observations, we develop a method to automatically summarise contexts of a term into a short text which can serve as a glossary entry. The method uses term-based and indicating phrase-based scoring methods to rank and select important contexts. A comparison of the similarity among the concept-centred summaries produced by our method, random baselines, and glossary entries produced by human shows that our summaries are better than the baselines used in this experiment.