We describe our approach for the DUC 2005 topicfocused summarization task by adapting a system initially designed to answer only definitional and biographical questions (i.e. “What/Who is X?”). We present a system overview, focusing on new adaptations and developments. We evaluate our performance and propose a novel combined metric that sythesizes a single score from the various metrics provided by NIST. We conclude with general observations about this year’s task and the direction of future work at Columbia
