Entity-Driven Rewrite for Multi-Document Summarization

In this paper we explore the benefits from and shortcomings of entity-driven noun phrase rewriting for multi-document summarization of news. The approach leads to 20% to 50% different content in the summary in comparison to an extractive summary produced using the same underlying approach, showing the promise the technique has to offer. In addition, summaries produced using entity-driven rewrite have higher linguistic quality than a comparison non-extractive system. Some improvement is also seen in content selection over extractive summarization as measured by pyramid method evaluation.