Predicting Salient Updates for Disaster Summarization

Chris Kedzie, Kathleen R. McKeown, Fernando Diaz

Abstract: During crises such as natural disasters or other human tragedies, information needs of both civilians and responders often require urgent, specialized treatment. Monitoring and summarizing a text stream during such an event remains a difficult problem. We present a system for update summarization which predicts the salience of sentences with respect to an event and then uses these predictions to directly bias a clustering algorithm for sentence selection, increasing the quality of the updates. We use novel, disaster-specific features for salience prediction, including geo-locations and language models representing the language of disaster. Our evaluation on a standard set of retrospective events using ROUGE shows that salience prediction provides a significant improvement over other approaches.