Link Analysis Based on Rhetorical Relations for Multi-Document Summarization

Abstract

This paper presents link analysis based on rhetorical relations with the aim of performing extractive summarization for multiple documents. We first extracted sentences with salient terms from individual document using statistical model. We then ranked the extracted sentences by measuring their relative importance according to their connectivity among the sentences in the document set using PageRank based on the rhetorical relations. The rhetorical relations were examined beforehand to determine which relations are crucial to this task, and the relations among sentences from documents were automatically identified by SVMs. We used the relations to emphasize important sentences during sentence ranking by PageRank and eliminate redundancy from the summary candidates. Our framework omits fully annotated sentences by humans and the evaluation results show that the combination of PageRank along with rhetorical relations does help to improve the quality of extractive summarization.