2001 Reports

Synthesizing composite topic structure trees for multiple domain specific documents

Kan, Min-Yen; McKeown, Kathleen; Klavans, Judith L.

Domain specific texts often have implicit rules on content and organization. We introduce a novel method for synthesizing this topical structure. The system uses corpus examples and recursively merges their topics to build a hierarchical tree. A subjective cross domain evaluation showed that the system performed well in combining related topics and in highlighting important ones.