2001 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Sentence ordering in multidocument summarization

McKeown, Kathleen; Barzilay, Regina; Elhadad, Noemie

The problem of organizing information for multidocument summarization so that the generated summary is coherent has received relatively little attention. In this paper, we describe two naive ordering techniques and show that they do not perform well. We present an integrated strategy for ordering information, combining constraints from chronological order of events and cohesion. This strategy was derived from empirical observations based on experiments asking humans to order information. Evaluation of our augmented algorithm shows a significant improvement of the ordering over the two naive techniques we used as baseline.