Tsinghua University at TAC 2009: Summarizing Multi-documents by Information Distance

This paper presents our extractive summarization systems at the update summarization track of TAC 2009. This system is based on our newly developed document summarization framework under the theory of conditional information distance among many objects. The best summary is defined in this paper to be the one which has the minimum information distance to the entire document set. The best update summary has the minimum conditional information distance to a document cluster given that a prior document cluster has already been read. Experiments on the TAC dataset have proved that our method has got a good performance in many categories