Towards Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization Using Submodular Function-Based Framework, Sentence Compression and Merging

AbstractWe propose a submodular function-based summarization system which integrates three important measures namely importance, coverage, and non-redundancy to detect the important sentences for the summary. We design monotone and submodular functions which allow us to apply an efficient and scalable greedy algorithm to obtain informative and well-covered summaries. In addition, we integrate two abstraction-based methods namely sentence compression and merging for generating an abstractive sentence set. We design our summarization models for both generic and query-focused summarization. Experimental results on DUC-2004 and DUC-2007 datasets show that our generic and query-focused summarizers have outperformed the state-of-the-art summarization systems in terms of ROUGE-1 and ROUGE-2 recall and F-measure.