Query Snowball: A Co-occurrence-based Approach to Multi-document Summarization for Question Answering

We propose a new method for query-oriented extractive multi-document summarization. To enrich the information need representation of a given query, we build a co-occurrence graph to obtain words that augment the original query terms. We then formulate the summarization problem as a Maximum Coverage Problem with Knapsack Constraints based on word pairs rather than single words. Our experiments with the NTCIR ACLIA question answering test collections show that our method achieves a pyramid F3-score of up to 0.313, a 36% improvement over a baseline using Maximal Marginal Relevance.