MRS for multi-document summarization by sentence extraction

A Multi-document Rhetorical Structure (MRS) is proposed for multi-document automatic summarization task. In this structure, interrelationship between text units, including the correlation between units calculated by hierarchical topic tree, the rhetorical relationship and temporal relationship, were represented at different levels of granularity. MRS simplified traditional multi-document representation in cross structure theory and supplement change and distribution information of events topics which cannot be obtained in information fusion theory. Concretely, a series of algorithms including building MRS, multi-document information fusion based MRS and summarization generation are proposed. The capability of concurrently fuse multiple knowledge sources of MRS strategies is testified by sets of experiments and shows good result.