Query Snowball: A Co-occurrence-based Approach to Multi-document Summarization for Question Answering

Hajime Morita1,  Tetsuya Sakai2,  Manabu Okumura3
1Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2Microsoft Research Asia, 3Precision and Intelligence Laboratory, Tokyo Institute of Technology


Abstract

We propose a new method for query-oriented extractive multi-document summarization. To enrich the information need representation of a given query, we build a co-occurrence graph to obtain words that augment the original query terms. We then formulate the summarization problem as a Maximum Coverage Problem with Knapsack Constraints based on word pairs rather than single words. Our experiments with the NTCIR ACLIA question answering test collections show that our method achieves a pyramid F3-score of up to 0.313, a 36% improvement over a baseline using Maximal Marginal Relevance.




Full paper: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P11/P11-2039.pdf