Multi-document summarization based on rhetorical structure: Sentence extraction and evaluation

A Multi-document Rhetorical Structure (MRS) is proposed for multi-document automatic summarization task. This structure can represent interrelationship between text units at different levels of granularity and can describe simultaneously the happen and change of various events. MRS simplify traditional multi-document representation in cross structure theory and supplement change and distribution information of events topics which cannot be obtained in information fusion theory. Concretely, a series of algorithms including building MRS, multi-document information fusion based MRS and summarization generation are proposed. The capability of concurrently fuse multiple knowledge sources of MRS strategies is testified by sets of experiments and shows good result.