Query-Chain Focused Summarization
Tal Baumel, Raphael Cohen, Michael Elhadad · 2014
Update summarization is a form of multidocument summarization where a document set must be summarized in the context of other documents assumed to be known.Efficient update summarization must focus on identifying new information and avoiding repetition of known information.In Query-focused summarization, the task is to produce a summary as an answer to a given query.We introduce a new task, Query-Chain Summarization, which combines aspects of the two previous tasks: starting from a given document set, increasingly specific queries are considered, and a new summary is produced at each step.This process models exploratory search: a user explores a new topic by submitting a sequence of queries, inspecting a summary of the result set and phrasing a new query at each step.We present a novel dataset comprising 22 querychains sessions of length up to 3 with 3 matching human summaries each in the consumerhealth domain.Our analysis demonstrates that summaries produced in the context of such exploratory process are different from informative summaries.We present an algorithm for Query-Chain Summarization based on a new LDA topic model variant.Evaluation indicates the algorithm improves on strong baselines.