Improving the Estimation of Word Importance for News Multi-Document Summarization - Extended Technical Report

In this paper, we propose a supervised model for ranking word importance that incorporates a rich set of features. Our model is superior to prior approaches for identifying words used in human summaries. Moreover we show that an extractive summarizer which includes our estimation of word importance results in summaries comparable with the state-of-the-art by automatic evaluation

Graph-based Neural Multi-Document Summarization

We propose a neural multi-document summarization (MDS) system that incorporates sentence relation graphs. We employ a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) on the relation graphs, with sentence embeddings obtained from Recurrent Neural Networks as input node features. Through multiple layer-wise propagation, the GCN generates high-level hidden sentence features for salience estimation. We then use a greedy heuristic to extract salient sentences while avoiding redundancy. In our experiments on DUC 2004, we consider three types of sentence relation graphs and demonstrate the advantage of combining sentence relations in graphs with the representation power of deep neural networks. Our model improves upon traditional graph-based extractive approaches and the vanilla GRU sequence model with no graph, and it achieves competitive results against other state-of-the-art multi-document summarization systems.Comment: In CoNLL 201