Multi‐document summarization of news articles using an event‐based framework

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this research is to develop a method for automatic construction of multi‐document summaries of sets of news articles that might be retrieved by a web search engine in response to a user query.

Design/methodology/approach

Based on the cross‐document discourse analysis, an event‐based framework is proposed for integrating and organizing information extracted from different news articles. It has a hierarchical structure in which the summarized information is presented at the top level and more detailed information given at the lower levels. A tree‐view interface was implemented for displaying a multi‐document summary based on the framework. A preliminary user evaluation was performed by comparing the framework‐based summaries against the sentence‐based summaries.

Findings

In a small evaluation, all the human subjects preferred the framework‐based summaries to the sentence‐based summaries. It indicates that the event‐based framework is an effective way to summarize a set of news articles reporting an event or a series of relevant events.

Research limitations/implications

Limited to event‐based news articles only, not applicable to news critiques and other kinds of news articles. A summarization system based on the event‐based framework is being implemented.

Practical implications

Multi‐document summarization of news articles can adopt the proposed event‐based framework.

Originality/value

An event‐based framework for summarizing sets of news articles was developed and evaluated using a tree‐view interface for displaying such summaries.

Citation

Ou, S., Khoo, C.S.G. and Goh, D.H. (2006), "Multi‐document summarization of news articles using an event‐based framework", Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 58 No. 3, pp. 197-217. https://doi.org/10.1108/00012530610677237