Multi-document summarization of news articles using an event-based framework

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to develop a method for automatic construction of multi-document summaries of sets of news articles that might be retrieved by a web search engine in response to a user query. Design/methodology/approach – Based on the cross-document discourse analysis, an event-based framework is proposed for integrating and organizing information extracted from different news articles. It has a hierarchical structure in which the summarized information is presented at the top level and more detailed information given at the lower levels. A tree-view interface was implemented for displaying a multi-document summary based on the framework. A preliminary user evaluation was performed by comparing the framework-based summaries against the sentence-based summaries. Findings – In a small evaluation, all the human subjects preferred the framework-based summaries to the sentence-based summaries. It indicates that the event-based framework is an effective way to summarize a set of news articles reporting an event or a series of relevant events. Research limitations/implications – Limited to event-based news articles only, not applicable to news critiques and other kinds of news articles. A summarization system based on the event-based framework is being implemented. Practical implications – Multi-document summarization of news articles can adopt the proposed event-based framework. Originality/value – An event-based framework for summarizing sets of news articles was developed and evaluated using a tree-view interface for displaying such summaries.