Utilizing microblogs for improving automatic news high-lights extraction

• Main Authors: WEI, Zhongyu, GAO, Wei
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2014
• Subjects: Databases and Information Systems
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4580; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5583/viewcontent/C14_1083.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Story highlights form a succinct single-document summary consisting of 3-4 highlight sentences that reflect the gist of a news article. Automatically producing news highlights is very challenging. We propose a novel method to improve news highlights extraction by using microblogs. The hypothesis is that microblog posts, although noisy, are not only indicative of important pieces of information in the news story, but also inherently “short and sweet” resulting from the artificial compression effect due to the length limit. Given a news article, we formulate the problem as two rank-then-extract tasks: (1) we find a set of indicative tweets and use them to assist the ranking of news sentences for extraction; (2) we extract top ranked tweets as a substitute of sentence extraction. Results based on our news-tweets pairing corpus indicate that the method significantly outperform some strong baselines for single-document summarization.