1. Exploiting Timelines to Enhance Multi-document Summarization Jun-Ping Ng, Yan Chen, Min-Yen Kan, Zhoujun Li DSO National Laboratories National University of Singapore Beihang University

2. Outline • Overview • Approach • Experiments and Results • Discussion

3. Overview

4. Multi-document Summarization

5. Extractive Summarization • Find the most salient sentences in source collection • Top-k sentences are extracted to compose final summary • <Graphic>

6. Two Storms • A fierce cyclone packing extreme winds and torrential rain smashed into Bangladesh’s southwestern coast Thursday, wiping out homes and trees in what officials described as the worst storm in years. • More than 100,000 coastal villagers have been evacuated before the cyclone made landfall. • The storm matched one in 1991 that sparked a tidal wave that killed an estimated 138,000 people, Karmakar told AFP

7. Two Storms • A fierce cyclonepacking extreme winds and torrential rain smashed into Bangladesh’s southwestern coast Thursday, wiping out homes and trees in what officials described as the worst storm in years. • More than 100,000 coastal villagers have been evacuated before the cyclone made landfall. • The storm matched one in 1991 that sparked a tidal wave that killed an estimated 138,000 people, Karmakar told AFP

8. Timeline

9. Approach

10. Merging Timelines Into Summarization

11. Temporal Processing • Based on TimeML (Pustejovsky et al 2003) • Basic temporal units – events + timexes • Three steps • Event-timex temporal relation classification • Event-event temporal relation classification • Timex normalization • Merge to obtain timelines • <TODO>

12. Timelines

13. Summarization --- SWING • https://github.com/WING-NUS/SWING

14. Sentence Scoring • Time span importance • Contextual time span importance • Sentence temporal coverage density

15. Defining Timeline Features

16. Time Span Importance (TSI) • Time spans which contain many events are more salient • Sentences which references events in these time spans are thus better candidates for a summary

17. Scoring TSI

18. Contextual Time Span Importance (CTSI) • Time spans near to “important” time spans may also be important

19. Scoring CTSI

20. Sentence Temporal Coverage Density (TCD) • Number of sentences in a summary is limited • Favour sentences which • contain more events • covering a wide variety of time spans

21. Scoring TCD

22. Sentence Re-ordering • SWING makes use of the Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) algorithm to identify redundancies in selected sentences • MMR is heavily biased towards lexicons and surface similarities

23. Beyond Lexical Penalties An official in Barisal, 120 kilometres south of Dhaka, spoke of severe destruction as the 500 kilometre-wide mass of cloud passed overhead. “Many trees have been uprooted and houses and schools blown away,” Mostofa Kamal, a district relief and rehabilitation officer, told AFP by telephone. “Mud huts have been damaged and the roofs of several houses blown off,” said the state’s relief minister, Mortaza Hossain.

24. TimeMMR • Novel dimension to redundancy detection • Beyond lexical similarities, identify sentences which contain substantial time span overlaps • Candidate sentences which share many time spans with selected sentences are penalised

25. Experiments and Results

26. Results • TAC-2010 data set to train regression model • TAC-2011 data set to test • Using timelines lead to better summaries!

27. Overcoming Errors • Timelines contain errors • Errors from underlying temporal processing systems • Simplifying assumptions made in timeline construction • Lack of consistency checking and validation

28. Reliability Filtering • Identify timelines which potentially contain more errors • Exclude these when performing summarization

29. Length as a Metric • Use the length of a timeline as a gauge of its “accuracy” • Drop the use of timelines which are less than the average length, computed over the whole input document collection

30. Results • Experiments repeated with reliability filtering • Significant improvement obtained • After filtering timelines are used in 21 out of 44 document sets

31. Discussion

32. Text Example • Timelines Used • SWING

33. Future Work • Study the use of alternative evaluation metrics, especially for TimeMMR • Look at better metrics for reliability filtering • Expand the scope of the timelines that are used for more flexibility

34. Conclusion • The use of time is useful for summarization! • Sentence Scoring • Derive features from a timeline • Combine features with a supervised learning summarization framework • Sentence Re-ordering • Use overlapping time spans to identify redundancies

35. Thank you!