2003 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Columbia at the Document Understanding Conference 2003

McKeown, Kathleen; Barzilay, Regina; Nenkova, Ani; Schiffman, Barry; Sigelman, Sergey; Schlaiker, Andrew; Blair-Goldensohn, Sasha; Hatzivassiloglou, Vasileios

The Columbia Summarizer for DUC 2003, Task 2, is based on the multi-document summarization system that we developed for DUC 2002 (McKeown et al., 2002). It uses different summarization strategies depending on the type of documents in the input set. Four different strategies are used, one for single events, one for multiple related events, one for biographies and one for discussion of an issue with related events. The summarization strategy encoded in MULTIGEN is used for single event document sets. All other strategies are encoded in DEMS, which uses different parameter settings for different document input types. For Task 4, we adapted an open-ended question answering system that we have been developing as part of our AQUAINT project. The version used in DUC contains only a subset of the different techniques contained in the AQUAINT system given the differences in problem specification.