GenDocSum + MCLR: Generic document summarization based on maximum coverage and less redundancy

0957-4174/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. A http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2012.04.067 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected], a.ramiz@ With the rapid growth of information on the Internet and electronic government recently, automatic multi-document summarization has become an important task. Multi-document summarization is an optimization problem requiring simultaneous optimization of more than one objective function. In this study, when building summaries from multiple documents, we attempt to balance two objectives, content coverage and redundancy. Our goal is to investigate three fundamental aspects of the problem, i.e. designing an optimization model, solving the optimization problem and finding the solution to the best summary. We model multi-document summarization as a Quadratic Boolean Programing (QBP) problem where the objective function is a weighted combination of the content coverage and redundancy objectives. The objective function measures the possible summaries based on the identified salient sentences and overlap information between selected sentences. An innovative aspect of our model lies in its ability to remove redundancy while selecting representative sentences. The QBP problem has been solved by using a binary differential evolution algorithm. Evaluation of the model has been performed on the DUC2002, DUC2004 and DUC2006 data sets. We have evaluated our model automatically using ROUGE toolkit and reported the significance of our results through 95% confidence intervals. The experimental results show that the optimization-based approach for document summarization is truly a promising research direction. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.