SDbQfSum: Query-focused summarization framework basedon diversity and text semantic analysis

Query-focused multi-document summarization (Qf-MDS) is a sub-task of automatic text summarization that aims to extract a substitute summary from a document cluster of the same topic and based on a user query. Unlike other summarization tasks, Qf-MDS has specific research challenges including the differences and similarities across related document sets, the high degree of redundancy inherent in the summaries created from multiple related sources, relevance to the given query, topic diversity in the produced summary and the small source-to-summary compression ratio. In this work, we propose a semantic diversity feature based query-focused extractive summarizer (SDbQfSum) built on powerful text semantic representation techniques underpinned with Wikipedia commonsense knowledge in order to address the query-relevance, centrality, redundancy and diversity challenges. Specifically, a semantically parsed document text is combined with knowledge-based vectorial representation to extract effective sentence importance and query-relevance features. The proposed monolingual summarizer is evaluated on a standard English dataset for automatic query-focused summarization tasks, that is, the DUC2006 dataset. The obtained results show that our summarizer outperforms most state-of-the-art related approaches on one or more ROUGE measures achieving 0.418, 0.092 and 0.152 in ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2,and ROUGE-SU4 respectively. It also attains competitive performance with the slightly outperforming system(s), for example, the difference between our system's result and best system in ROUGE-1 is just 0.006. We also found through the conducted experiments that our proposed custom cluster merging algorithm significantly reduces information redundancy while maintaining topic diversity across documents

Retrieve-Cluster-Summarize: An Alternative to End-to-End Training for Query-specific Article Generation

Query-specific article generation is the task of, given a search query, generate a single article that gives an overview of the topic. We envision such articles as an alternative to presenting a ranking of search results. While generative Large Language Models (LLMs) like chatGPT also address this task, they are known to hallucinate new information, their models are secret, hard to analyze and control. Some generative LLMs provide supporting references, yet these are often unrelated to the generated content. As an alternative, we propose to study article generation systems that integrate document retrieval, query-specific clustering, and summarization. By design, such models can provide actual citations as provenance for their generated text. In particular, we contribute an evaluation framework that allows to separately trains and evaluate each of these three components before combining them into one system. We experimentally demonstrate that a system comprised of the best-performing individual components also obtains the best F-1 overall system quality.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure

Query-Based Summarization using Rhetorical Structure Theory

Research on Question Answering is focused mainly on classifying the question type and finding the answer. Presenting the answer in a way that suits the user’s needs has received little attention. This paper shows how existing question answering systems—which aim at finding precise answers to questions—can be improved by exploiting summarization techniques to extract more than just the answer from the document in which the answer resides. This is done using a graph search algorithm which searches for relevant sentences in the discourse structure, which is represented as a graph. The Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is used to create a graph representation of a text document. The output is an extensive answer, which not only answers the question, but also gives the user an opportunity to assess the accuracy of the answer (is this what I am looking for?), and to find additional information that is related to the question, and which may satisfy an information need. This has been implemented in a working multimodal question answering system where it operates with two independently developed question answering modules