Building a Language Model for Local Coherence in Multi-document Summaries Using a Discourse-Enriched Entity-Based Model

Local Coherence is a very important aspect in multi-document summarization, since good summaries not only condense the most relevant information, but also present it in a well-organized structure. One of the most investigated models for local coherence is the Entity-based model, which has been successfully used, once it facilitates the computational approach for coherence measurement. Particularly, this model was used for the evaluation of local coherence in multi-document summaries, achieving promising results. In order to improve the potential of the Entity-based model, we propose the creation of a language model for multi-document summaries that integrates the Entity-based model with discourse knowledge, mainly from Cross-document Structure Theory. Our results show that this type of information enriches the Entity-based Model by capturing other phenomena that are inherent to multi-document summaries, such as redundancy and complementarily, which improves the performance of the original model.