Straight to the point: Discovering themes for summary generation

This paper presents our approach to the problem of single sentence summarisation. We investigate the use of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to guide the generation of a summary towards the theme that is the focus of the document to be summarised. In doing so, the intuition is that the generated summary will more accurately reflect the content of the source document. Currently, we operate in the news domain and at present, our summaries are modelled on headlines. This paper presents SVD as an alternative method to determine if a word is a suitable candidate for inclusion in the headline. The results of a recall based evaluation comparing three different strategies to word selection, indicate that thematic information does help improve recall.