USUM: Update Summary Generation System

Abstract

Huge amount of information is present in the World Wide Web and a large amount is being added to it frequently. A query-specific summary of multiple documents is very helpful to the user in this context. Currently, few systems have been proposed for query-specific, extractive multi-document summarization. If a summary is available for a set of documents on a given query and if a new document is added to the corpus, generating an updated summary from the scratch is time consuming and many a times it is not practical/possible. In this paper we propose a solution to this problem. This is especially useful in a scenario where the source documents are not accessible. We cleverly embed the sentences of the current summary into the new document and then perform query-specific summary generation on that document. Our experimental results show that the performance of the proposed approach is good in terms of both quality and efficiency.