Sentence Extraction by Spreading Activation through Sentence Similarity

Although there has been a great deal of research on automatic summarization, most methods rely on statistical methods, disregarding relationships between extracted textual segments. We propose a novel method to extract a set of comprehensible sentences which centers on several key points to ensure sentence connectivity. It features a similarity network from documents with a lexical dictionary, and spreading activation to rank sentences. We show evaluation results of a multi-document summarization system based on the method participating in a competition of summarization, TSC (Text Summarization Challenge) task, organized by the third NTCIR project.