Next-Generation Summarization: Contrastive, Focused, and Update Summaries

Classical multi-document summaries focus on the common topics of a document set and omit distinctive themes particular to a single document—thereby often suppressing precisely that kind of information a user might need for a specific task. This can be avoided through advanced multi-document summaries that take a user's context and history into account, by delivering focused, contrastive, or update summaries. To facilitate the generation of these different summaries, we propose to generate all types from a single data structure, topic clusters, which provide for an abstract representation of a set of documents. Evaluations carried out on five years' worth of data from the DUC summarization competition prove the feasibility of this approach.