Graph-based informative-sentence selection for opinion summarization

In this paper, we propose a new framework for opinion summarization based on sentence selection. Our goal is to assist users to get helpful opinion suggestions from reviews by only reading a short summary with few informative sentences, where the quality of summary is evaluated in terms of both aspect coverage and viewpoints preservation. More specifically, we formulate the informative-sentence selection problem in opinion summarization as a community-leader detection problem, where a community consists of a cluster of sentences towards the same aspect of an entity. The detected leaders of the communities can be considered as the most informative sentences of the corresponding aspect, while informativeness of a sentence is defined by its informativeness within both its community and the document it belongs to. Review data from six product domains from Amazon.com are used to verify the effectiveness of our method for opinion summarization.