Query Independent Sentence Scoring approach to DUC 2006

Abstract

The task in Document Understanding Conferences (DUC1) 2006 is to generate a fixed length, user oriented, multi doc-ument summary, which remains same as that of DUC 2005. We have used two fea-tures to score the sentences based. The sentences are picked to form the sum-mary based on the calculated score. The first feature is a query dependent scoring of a sentence which is an improvement over the HAL feature. The second fea-ture is based on the observation that sen-tence importance, which is independent of the query, needs to be captured in the current approaches. We have explored the use of web in scoring the sentences in a query independent manner. Experi-ments show a performance gain of 6-7% over HAL feature by the inclusion of two new features. Our summarization system was ranked 1st in all automatic evalua-tions with significant margin from second best system, 5th in responsiveness and 9th in linguistic quality evaluations in DUC 2006. Relatively lower performance in linguistic quality can be attributed to the stripped off sentences at the end of sum-mary, when the summary length is exceed-ing 250 words.