The Next Step for Multi-Document Summarization: A Heterogeneous Multi-Genre Corpus Built with a Novel Construction Approach

Research in multi-document summarization has focused on newswire corpora since the early beginnings. However, the newswire genre provides genre-specific features such as sentence position which are easy to exploit in summarization systems. Such easy to exploit genre-specific features are available in other genres as well. We therefore present the new hMDS corpus for multi-document summarization, which contains heterogeneous source documents from multiple text genres, as well as summaries with different lengths. For the construction of the corpus, we developed a novel construction approach which is suited to build large and heterogeneous summarization corpora with little effort. The method reverses the usual process of writing summaries for given source documents: it combines already available summaries with appropriate source documents. In a detailed analysis, we show that our new corpus is significantly different from the homogeneous corpora commonly used, and that it is heterogeneous along several dimensions. Our experimental evaluation using well-known state-of-the-art summarization systems shows that our corpus poses new challenges in the field of multi-document summarization. Last but not least, we make our corpus publicly available to the research community at the corpus web page https://github.com/AIPHES/hMDS.