Document concept lattice for text understanding and summarization

We argue that the quality of a summary can be evaluated based on how many concepts in the original document(s) that can be preserved after summarization. Here, a concept refers to an abstract or concrete entity or its action often expressed by diverse terms in text. Summary generation can thus be considered as an optimization problem of selecting a set of sentences with minimal answer loss. In this paper, we propose a document concept lattice that indexes the hierarchy of local topics tied to a set of frequent concepts and the corresponding sentences containing these topics. The local topics will specify the promising sub-spaces related to the selected concepts and sentences. Based on this lattice, the summary is an optimized selection of a set of distinct and salient local topics that lead to maximal coverage of concepts with the given number of sentences. Our summarizer based on the concept lattice has demonstrated competitive performance in Document Understanding Conference 2005 and 2006 evaluations as well as follow-on tests.     

Resolving ambiguity in biomedical text to improve summarization

Access to the vast body of research literature that is now available on biomedicine and related fields can be improved with automatic summarization. This paper describes a summarization system for the biomedical domain that represents documents as graphs formed from concepts and relations in the UMLS Metathesaurus. This system has to deal with the ambiguities that occur in biomedical documents. We describe a variety of strategies that make use of MetaMap and Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) to accurately map biomedical documents onto UMLS Metathesaurus concepts. Evaluation is carried out using a collection of 150 biomedical scientific articles from the BioMed Central corpus. We find that using WSD improves the quality of the summaries generated.     

SRL-ESA-TextSum: A text summarization approach based on semantic role labeling and explicit semantic analysis

Automatic text summarization attempts to provide an effective solution to today’s unprecedented growth of textual data. This paper proposes an innovative graph-based text summarization framework for generic single and multi document summarization. The summarizer benefits from two well-established text semantic representation techniques; Semantic Role Labelling (SRL) and Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) as well as the constantly evolving collective human knowledge in Wikipedia. The SRL is used to achieve sentence semantic parsing whose word tokens are represented as a vector of weighted Wikipedia concepts using ESA method. The essence of the developed framework is to construct a unique concept graph representation underpinned by semantic role-based multi-node (under sentence level) vertices for summarization. We have empirically evaluated the summarization system using the standard publicly available dataset from Document Understanding Conference 2002 (DUC 2002). Experimental results indicate that the proposed summarizer outperforms all state-of-the-art related comparators in the single document summarization based on the ROUGE-1 and ROUGE-2 measures, while also ranking second in the ROUGE-1 and ROUGE-SU4 scores for the multi-document summarization. On the other hand, the testing also demonstrates the scalability of the system, i.e., varying the evaluation data size is shown to have little impact on the summarizer performance, particularly for the single document summarization task. In a nutshell, the findings demonstrate the power of the role-based and vectorial semantic representation when combined with the crowd-sourced knowledge base in Wikipedia.     

Key phrase aware transformer for abstractive summarization

Abstractive summarization aims to generate a concise summary covering salient content from single or multiple text documents. Many recent abstractive summarization methods are built on the transformer model to capture long-range dependencies in the input text and achieve parallelization. In the transformer encoder, calculating attention weights is a crucial step for encoding input documents. Input documents usually contain some key phrases conveying salient information, and it is important to encode these phrases completely. However, existing transformer-based summarization works did not consider key phrases in input when determining attention weights. Consequently, some of the tokens within key phrases only receive small attention weights, which is not conducive to encoding the semantic information of input documents. In this paper, we introduce some prior knowledge of key phrases into the transformer-based summarization model and guide the model to encode key phrases. For the contextual representation of each token in the key phrase, we assume the tokens within the same key phrase make larger contributions compared with other tokens in the input sequence. Based on this assumption, we propose the Key Phrase Aware Transformer (KPAT), a model with the highlighting mechanism in the encoder to assign greater attention weights for tokens within key phrases. Specifically, we first extract key phrases from the input document and score the phrases’ importance. Then we build the block diagonal highlighting matrix to indicate these phrases’ importance scores and positions. To combine self-attention weights with key phrases’ importance scores, we design two structures of highlighting attention for each head and the multi-head highlighting attention. Experimental results on two datasets (Multi-News and PubMed) from different summarization tasks and domains show that our KPAT model significantly outperforms advanced summarization baselines. We conduct more experiments to analyze the impact of each part of our model on the summarization performance and verify the effectiveness of our proposed highlighting mechanism.     

Textual keyword extraction and summarization: State-of-the-art

With the advent of Web 2.0, there exist many online platforms that results in massive textual data production such as social networks, online blogs, magazines etc. This textual data carries information that can be used for betterment of humanity. Hence, there is a dire need to extract potential information out of it. This study aims to present an overview of approaches that can be applied to extract and later present these valuable information nuggets residing within text in brief, clear and concise way. In this regard, two major tasks of automatic keyword extraction and text summarization are being reviewed. To compile the literature, scientific articles were collected using major digital computing research repositories. In the light of acquired literature, survey study covers early approaches up to all the way till recent advancements using machine learning solutions. Survey findings conclude that annotated benchmark datasets for various textual data-generators such as twitter and social forms are not available. This scarcity of dataset has resulted into relatively less progress in many domains. Also, applications of deep learning techniques for the task of automatic keyword extraction are relatively unaddressed. Hence, impact of various deep architectures stands as an open research direction. For text summarization task, deep learning techniques are applied after advent of word vectors, and are currently governing state-of-the-art for abstractive summarization. Currently, one of the major challenges in these tasks is semantic aware evaluation of generated results.     

Topic discovery based on text mining techniques

In this paper, we present a topic discovery system aimed to reveal the implicit knowledge present in news streams. This knowledge is expressed as a hierarchy of topic/subtopics, where each topic contains the set of documents that are related to it and a summary extracted from these documents. Summaries so built are useful to browse and select topics of interest from the generated hierarchies. Our proposal consists of a new incremental hierarchical clustering algorithm, which combines both partitional and agglomerative approaches, taking the main benefits from them. Finally, a new summarization method based on Testor Theory has been proposed to build the topic summaries. Experimental results in the TDT2 collection demonstrate its usefulness and effectiveness not only as a topic detection system, but also as a classification and summarization tool.     

Supervised automatic evaluation for summarization with voted regression model

The high quality evaluation of generated summaries is needed if we are to improve automatic summarization systems. Although human evaluation provides better results than automatic evaluation methods, its cost is huge and it is difficult to reproduce the results. Therefore, we need an automatic method that simulates human evaluation if we are to improve our summarization system efficiently. Although automatic evaluation methods have been proposed, they are unreliable when used for individual summaries. To solve this problem, we propose a supervised automatic evaluation method based on a new regression model called the voted regression model (VRM). VRM has two characteristics: (1) model selection based on ‘corrected AIC’ to avoid multicollinearity, (2) voting by the selected models to alleviate the problem of overfitting. Evaluation results obtained for TSC3 and DUC2004 show that our method achieved error reductions of about 17–51% compared with conventional automatic evaluation methods. Moreover, our method obtained the highest correlation coefficients in several different experiments.     

A survey on evaluation of summarization methods

The increasing volume of textual information on any topic requires its compression to allow humans to digest it. This implies detecting the most important information and condensing it. These challenges have led to new developments in the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) such as narrative summarization and evaluation methodologies for narrative extraction. Despite some progress over recent years with several solutions for information extraction and text summarization, the problems of generating consistent narrative summaries and evaluating them are still unresolved. With regard to evaluation, manual assessment is expensive, subjective and not applicable in real time or to large collections. Moreover, it does not provide re-usable benchmarks. Nevertheless, commonly used metrics for summary evaluation still imply substantial human effort since they require a comparison of candidate summaries with a set of reference summaries. The contributions of this paper are three-fold. First, we provide a comprehensive overview of existing metrics for summary evaluation. We discuss several limitations of existing frameworks for summary evaluation. Second, we introduce an automatic framework for the evaluation of metrics that does not require any human annotation. Finally, we evaluate the existing assessment metrics on a Wikipedia data set and a collection of scientific articles using this framework. Our findings show that the majority of existing metrics based on vocabulary overlap are not suitable for assessment based on comparison with a full text and we discuss this outcome.     

Query-oriented text summarization based on hypergraph transversals

The rise in the amount of textual resources available on the Internet has created the need for tools of automatic document summarization. The main challenges of query-oriented extractive summarization are (1) to identify the topics of the documents and (2) to recover query-relevant sentences of the documents that together cover these topics. Existing graph- or hypergraph-based summarizers use graph-based ranking algorithms to produce individual scores of relevance for the sentences. Hence, these systems fail to measure the topics jointly covered by the sentences forming the summary, which tends to produce redundant summaries. To address the issue of selecting non-redundant sentences jointly covering the main query-relevant topics of a corpus, we propose a new method using the powerful theory of hypergraph transversals. First, we introduce a new topic model based on the semantic clustering of terms in order to discover the topics present in a corpus. Second, these topics are modeled as the hyperedges of a hypergraph in which the nodes are the sentences. A summary is then produced by generating a transversal of nodes in the hypergraph. Algorithms based on the theory of submodular functions are proposed to generate the transversals and to build the summaries. The proposed summarizer outperforms existing graph- or hypergraph-based summarizers by at least 6% of ROUGE-SU4 F-measure on DUC 2007 dataset. It is moreover cheaper than existing hypergraph-based summarizers in terms of computational time complexity.     

Centroid-based summarization of multiple documents

We present a multi-document summarizer, MEAD, which generates summaries using cluster centroids produced by a topic detection and tracking system. We describe two new techniques, a centroid-based summarizer, and an evaluation scheme based on sentence utility and subsumption. We have applied this evaluation to both single and multiple document summaries. Finally, we describe two user studies that test our models of multi-document summarization.     

The impact of preprocessing on text classification

Preprocessing is one of the key components in a typical text classification framework. This paper aims to extensively examine the impact of preprocessing on text classification in terms of various aspects such as classification accuracy, text domain, text language, and dimension reduction. For this purpose, all possible combinations of widely used preprocessing tasks are comparatively evaluated on two different domains, namely e-mail and news, and in two different languages, namely Turkish and English. In this way, contribution of the preprocessing tasks to classification success at various feature dimensions, possible interactions among these tasks, and also dependency of these tasks to the respective languages and domains are comprehensively assessed. Experimental analysis on benchmark datasets reveals that choosing appropriate combinations of preprocessing tasks, rather than enabling or disabling them all, may provide significant improvement on classification accuracy depending on the domain and language studied on.     

Feature selection based on absolute deviation factor for text classification

In text classification, it is necessary to perform feature selection to alleviate the curse of dimensionality caused by high-dimensional text data. In this paper, we utilize class term frequency (CTF) and class document frequency (CDF) to characterize the relevance between terms and categories in the level of term frequency (TF) and document frequency (DF). On the basis of relevance measurement above, three feature selection methods (ADF based on CTF (ADF-CTF), ADF based on CDF (ADF-CDF), and ADF based on both CTF and CDF (ADF-CTDF)) are proposed to identify relevant and discriminant terms by introducing absolute deviation factors (ADFs). Absolute deviation, a statistic concept, is first adopted to measure the relevance divergence characterized by CTF and CDF. In addition, ADF-CTF and ADF-CDF can be combined with existing DF-based and TF-based methods, respectively, which results in new ADF-based methods. Experimental results on six high-dimensional textual datasets using three classifiers indicate that ADF-based methods outperform original DF-based and TF-based ones in 89% cases in terms of Micro-F1 and Macro-F1, which demonstrates the role of ADF integrated in existing methods to boost the classification performance. In addition, findings also show that ADF-CTDF ranks first averagely among multiple datasets and significantly outperforms other methods in 99% cases.     

Using query expansion in graph-based approach for query-focused multi-document summarization

This paper presents a novel query expansion method, which is combined in the graph-based algorithm for query-focused multi-document summarization, so as to resolve the problem of information limit in the original query. Our approach makes use of both the sentence-to-sentence relations and the sentence-to-word relations to select the query biased informative words from the document set and use them as query expansions to improve the sentence ranking result. Compared to previous query expansion approaches, our approach can capture more relevant information with less noise. We performed experiments on the data of document understanding conference (DUC) 2005 and DUC 2006, and the evaluation results show that the proposed query expansion method can significantly improve the system performance and make our system comparable to the state-of-the-art systems.     

Task-based evaluation of text summarization using Relevance Prediction

This article introduces a new task-based evaluation measure called Relevance Prediction that is a more intuitive measure of an individual’s performance on a real-world task than interannotator agreement. Relevance Prediction parallels what a user does in the real world task of browsing a set of documents using standard search tools, i.e., the user judges relevance based on a short summary and then that same user—not an independent user—decides whether to open (and judge) the corresponding document. This measure is shown to be a more reliable measure of task performance than LDC Agreement, a current gold-standard based measure used in the summarization evaluation community. Our goal is to provide a stable framework within which developers of new automatic measures may make stronger statistical statements about the effectiveness of their measures in predicting summary usefulness. We demonstrate—as a proof-of-concept methodology for automatic metric developers—that a current automatic evaluation measure has a better correlation with Relevance Prediction than with LDC Agreement and that the significance level for detected differences is higher for the former than for the latter.     

Older versions of the ROUGEeval summarization evaluation system were easier to fool

We show some limitations of the ROUGE evaluation method for automatic summarization. We present a method for automatic summarization based on a Markov model of the source text. By a simple greedy word selection strategy, summaries with high ROUGE-scores are generated. These summaries would however not be considered good by human readers. The method can be adapted to trick different settings of the ROUGEeval package.     

Cross-lingual text categorization: Conquering language boundaries in globalized environments

Text categorization pertains to the automatic learning of a text categorization model from a training set of preclassified documents on the basis of their contents and the subsequent assignment of unclassified documents to appropriate categories. Most existing text categorization techniques deal with monolingual documents (i.e., written in the same language) during the learning of the text categorization model and category assignment (or prediction) for unclassified documents. However, with the globalization of business environments and advances in Internet technology, an organization or individual may generate and organize into categories documents in one language and subsequently archive documents in different languages into existing categories, which necessitate cross-lingual text categorization (CLTC). Specifically, cross-lingual text categorization deals with learning a text categorization model from a set of training documents written in one language (e.g., L₁) and then classifying new documents in a different language (e.g., L₂). Motivated by the significance of this demand, this study aims to design a CLTC technique with two different category assignment methods, namely, individual- and cluster-based. Using monolingual text categorization as a performance reference, our empirical evaluation results demonstrate the cross-lingual capability of the proposed CLTC technique. Moreover, the classification accuracy achieved by the cluster-based category assignment method is statistically significantly higher than that attained by the individual-based method.     

On macro- and micro-level information in multiple documents and its influence on summarization

A well-known challenge for multi-document summarization (MDS) is that a single best or “gold standard” summary does not exist, i.e. it is often difficult to secure a consensus among reference summaries written by different authors. It therefore motivates us to study what the “important information” is in multiple input documents that will guide different authors in writing a summary. In this paper, we propose the notions of macro- and micro-level information. Macro-level information refers to the salient topics shared among different input documents, while micro-level information consists of different sentences that act as elaborating or provide complementary details for those salient topics. Experimental studies were conducted to examine the influence of macro- and micro-level information on summarization and its evaluation. Results showed that human subjects highly relied on macro-level information when writing a summary. The length allowed for summaries is the leading factor that affects the summary agreement. Meanwhile, our summarization evaluation approach based on the proposed macro- and micro-structure information also suggested that micro-level information offered complementary details for macro-level information. We believe that both levels of information form the “important information” which affects the modeling and evaluation of automatic summarization systems.     

On enhancing the robustness of timeline summarization test collections

Timeline generation systems are a class of algorithms that produce a sequence of time-ordered sentences or text snippets extracted in real-time from high-volume streams of digital documents (e.g. news articles), focusing on retaining relevant and informative content for a particular information need (e.g. topic or event). These systems have a range of uses, such as producing concise overviews of events for end-users (human or artificial agents). To advance the field of automatic timeline generation, robust and reproducible evaluation methodologies are needed. To this end, several evaluation metrics and labeling methodologies have recently been developed - focusing on information nugget or cluster-based ground truth representations, respectively. These methodologies rely on human assessors manually mapping timeline items (e.g. sentences) to an explicit representation of what information a ‘good’ summary should contain. However, while these evaluation methodologies produce reusable ground truth labels, prior works have reported cases where such evaluations fail to accurately estimate the performance of new timeline generation systems due to label incompleteness. In this paper, we first quantify the extent to which the timeline summarization test collections fail to generalize to new summarization systems, then we propose, evaluate and analyze new automatic solutions to this issue. In particular, using a depooling methodology over 19 systems and across three high-volume datasets, we quantify the degree of system ranking error caused by excluding those systems when labeling. We show that when considering lower-effectiveness systems, the test collections are robust (the likelihood of systems being miss-ranked is low). However, we show that the risk of systems being mis-ranked increases as the effectiveness of systems held-out from the pool increases. To reduce the risk of mis-ranking systems, we also propose a range of different automatic ground truth label expansion techniques. Our results show that the proposed expansion techniques can be effective at increasing the robustness of the TREC-TS test collections, as they are able to generate large numbers missing matches with high accuracy, markedly reducing the number of mis-rankings by up to 50%.     

DUC in context

Recent years have seen increased interest in text summarization with emphasis on evaluation of prototype systems. Many factors can affect the design of such evaluations, requiring choices among competing alternatives. This paper examines several major themes running through three evaluations: SUMMAC, NTCIR, and DUC, with a concentration on DUC. The themes are extrinsic and intrinsic evaluation, evaluation procedures and methods, generic versus focused summaries, single- and multi-document summaries, length and compression issues, extracts versus abstracts, and issues with genre.