Document summarization based on word associations

Oskar Gross, Antoine Doucet, Hannu Toivonen

Abstract: In the age of big data, automatic methods for creating summaries of documents become increasingly important. In this paper we propose a novel, unsupervised method for (multi-)document summarization. In an unsupervised and language-independent fashion, this approach relies on the strength of word associations in the set of documents to be summarized. The summaries are generated by picking sentences which cover the most specific word associations of the document(s). We measure the performance on the DUC 2007 dataset. Our experiments indicate that the proposed method is the best-performing unsupervised summarization method in the state-of-the-art that makes no use of human-curated knowledge bases.