Weighted consensus multi-document summarization

Multi-document summarization is a fundamental tool for document understanding and has received much attention recently. Given a collection of documents, a variety of summarization methods based on different strategies have been proposed to extract the most important sentences from the original documents. However, very few studies have been reported on aggregating different summarization methods to possibly generate better summary results. In this paper, we propose a weighted consensus summarization method to combine the results from single summarization systems. We evaluate and compare our proposed weighted consensus method with various baseline combination methods. Experimental results on DUC2002 and DUC2004 data sets demonstrate the performance improvement by aggregating multiple summarization systems, and our proposed weighted consensus summarization method outperforms other combination methods. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.