We learn a joint model of sentence extraction and compression for multi-document summarization. Our model scores candidate summaries according to a combined linear model whose features factor over (1) the n-gram types in the summary and (2) the compressions used. We train the model using a marginbased objective whose loss captures end summary quality. Because of the exponentially large set of candidate summaries, we use a cutting-plane algorithm to incrementally detect and add active constraints efficiently. Inference in our model can be cast as an ILP and thereby solved in reasonable time; we also present a fast approximation scheme which achieves similar performance. Our jointly extracted and compressed summaries outperform both unlearned baselines and our learned extraction-only system on both ROUGE and Pyramid, without a drop in judged linguistic quality. We achieve the highest published ROUGE results to date on the TAC 2008 data set.
REF proposed an approach to score the candidate summaries according to a combined linear model of extractive sentence selection and compression.
Jointly Learning to Extract and Compress
Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Computer Science