An Optimization Approach to Automatic Generic Document Summarization

In this paper, we have presented an optimization approach to document summarization. The potential of optimization based document summarization models has not been well explored to date. This is partially the difficulty to formulate the criteria used for objective assessment. We modeled document summarization as the linear and nonlinear optimization problems. These models generally attempt simultaneously to balance coverage and diversity in the summary. To solve the optimization problem we developed a novel particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Experiments showed our linear and nonlinear models produce very competitive results, which significantly outperform the NIST baselines in both years. More important, although linear and nonlinear models are comparable to the top three systems S24, S15, and S12 in the DUC2006, they are even superior to the best participating system in the DUC2005.