A Novel Chinese Multi-Document Summarization Using Clustering Based Sentence Extraction

This paper proposes a strategy for Chinese multi-document summarization based on clustering and sentence extraction. It adopts the term vector to represent the linguistic unit in Chinese document, which obtains higher representation quality than traditional word-based vector space model in a certain extent. As for clustering, we propose two heuristics to automatically detect the proper number of clusters: the first one makes full use of the summary length fixed by the user; the second is a stability method, which has been applied to other unsupervised learning problems. We also discuss a global searching method for sentence selection from the clusters. To evaluate our summarization strategy, an extrinsic evaluation method based on classification task is adopted. Experimental results on news document set show that the new strategy can significantly enhance the performance of Chinese multi-document summarization