Gibberish, assistant, or master? Using tweets linking to news for extractive single-document summarization

• Main Authors: WEI, Zhongyu, GAO, Wei
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2015
• Subjects: Databases and Information Systems
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4578; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5581/viewcontent/p1003_wei.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Single-document summarization is a challenging task. In this paper, we explore effective ways using the tweets linking to news for generating extractive summary of each document. We reveal the very basic value of tweets that can be utilized by regarding every tweet as a vote for candidate sentences. Base on such finding, we resort to unsupervised summarization models by leveraging the linking tweets to master the ranking of candidate extracts via random walk on a heterogeneous graph. The advantage is that we can use the linking tweets to opportunistically "supervise" the summarization with no need of reference summaries. Furthermore, we analyze the influence of the volume and latency of tweets on the quality of output summaries since tweets come after news release. Compared to truly supervised summarizer unaware of tweets, our method achieves significantly better results with reasonably small tradeoff on latency; compared to the same using tweets as auxiliary features, our method is comparable while needing less tweets and much shorter time to achieve significant outperformance.