LexPageRank: Prestige in Multi-Document Text Summarization

Multidocument extractive summarization relies on the concept of sentence centrality to identify the most important sentences in a document. Centrality is typically defined in terms of the presence of particular important words or in terms of similarity to a centroid pseudo-sentence. We are now considering an approach for computing sentence importance based on the concept of eigenvector centrality (prestige) that we call LexPageRank. In this model, a sentence connectivity matrix is constructed based on cosine similarity. If the cosine similarity between two sentences exceeds a particular predefined threshold, a corresponding edge is added to the connectivity matrix. We provide an evaluation of our method on DUC 2004 data. The results show that our approach outperforms centroid-based summarization and is quite successful compared to other summarization systems.