Centroid-Based Summarization of Multiple Documents: Sentence Extraction, Utility-Based Evaluation, and User Studies

We present a multi-document summarizer, called MEAD, which generates summaries using cluster centroids produced by a topic detection and tracking system. We also describe two new techniques, based on sentence utility and subsumption, which we have applied to the evaluation of both single and multiple document summaries. Finally, we describe two user studies that test our models of multi-document summarization. 1 Introduction On October 12, 1999, a relatively small number of news sources mentioned in passing that Pakistani Defense Minister Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf was away visiting Sri Lanka. However, all world agencies would be actively reporting on the major events that were to happen in Pakistan in the following days: Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif announced that in Gen. Musharraf's absence, the Defense Minister had been sacked and replaced by General Zia Addin. Large numbers of messages from various sources started to inundate the newswire: about the army's occupation of the c..