A novel biased diversity ranking model for query-oriented multi-document summarization

Abstract

Query-oriented multi-document summarization (QMDS) attempts to generate a concise piece of text by extracting sentences from a target document collection, with the aim of not only conveying the key content of that corpus, also, satisfying the information needs expressed by that query. Due to its great applicable value, QMDS has been intensively studied in recent decades. Three properties are supposed crucial for a good summary, i.e., relevance, prestige and low redundancy (or so-called diversity). Unfortunately, most existing work either disregarded the concern of diversity, or handled it with non-optimized heuristics, usually based on greedy sentences election. Inspired by the manifold-ranking process, which deals with query-biased prestige, and DivRank algorithm which captures query-independent diversity ranking, in this paper, we propose a novel biased diversity ranking model, named ManifoldDivRank, for query-sensitive summarization tasks. The top-ranked sentences discovered by our algorithm not only enjoy query-oriented high prestige, more importantly, they are dissimilar with each other. Experimental results on DUC2005 and DUC2006 benchmark data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal.