Heterogeneous-Length Text Topic Modeling for Reader-Aware Multi-Document Summarization

Abstract

More and more user comments like Tweets are available, which often contain user concerns. In order to meet the demands of users, a good summary generating from multiple documents should consider reader interests as reflected in reader comments. In this article, we focus on how to generate a summary from multi-document documents by considering reader comments, named as reader-aware multi-document summarization (RA-MDS). We present an innovative topic-based method for RA-MDA, which exploits latent topics to obtain the most salient and lessen redundancy summary from multiple documents. Since finding latent topics for RA-MDS is a crucial step, we also present a Heterogeneous-length Text Topic Modeling (HTTM) to extract topics from the corpus that includes both news reports and user comments, denoted as heterogeneous-length texts. In this case, the latent topics extract by HTTM cover not only important aspects of the event, but also aspects that attract reader interests. Comparisons on summary benchmark datasets also confirm that the proposed RA-MDS method is effective in improving the quality of extracted summaries. In addition, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed topic modeling method outperforms existing topic modeling algorithms.