An Empirical Study of Ontology-Based Multi-Document Summarization in Disaster Management

Domain ontology, as a conceptual model, provides a meaningful framework for semantic representation of textual information. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of using the ontology in solving multi-document summarization problems in the domain of disaster management. We provide an empirical study of different approaches in which the ontology has been used for summarization tasks. Extensive experiments on a collection of press releases relevant to Hurricane Wilma in 2005 demonstrate that ontology-based multi-document summarization methods outperform other baselines in terms of the summary quality.