2001 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Simfinder: A flexible clustering tool for summarization

Hatzivassiloglou, Vasileios; Klavans, Judith L.; Holcombe, Melissa L.; Barzilay, Regina; Kan, Min-yen; McKeown, Kathleen

We present a statistical similarity measuring and clustering tool, SIMFINDER, that organizes small pieces of text from one or multiple documents into tight clusters. By placing highly related text units in the same cluster, SIMFINDER enables a subsequent content selection/generation component to reduce each cluster to a single sentence, either by extraction or by reformulation. We report on improvements in the similarity and clustering components of SIMFINDER, including a quantitative evaluation, and establish the generality of the approach by interfacing SIMFINDER to two very different summarization systems.