English

Semantic WordRank: Generating Finer Single-Document Summarizations

Computation and Language 2018-09-14 v1

Abstract

We present Semantic WordRank (SWR), an unsupervised method for generating an extractive summary of a single document. Built on a weighted word graph with semantic and co-occurrence edges, SWR scores sentences using an article-structure-biased PageRank algorithm with a Softplus function adjustment, and promotes topic diversity using spectral subtopic clustering under the Word-Movers-Distance metric. We evaluate SWR on the DUC-02 and SummBank datasets and show that SWR produces better summaries than the state-of-the-art algorithms over DUC-02 under common ROUGE measures. We then show that, under the same measures over SummBank, SWR outperforms each of the three human annotators (aka. judges) and compares favorably with the combined performance of all judges.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1809.04649,
  title  = {Semantic WordRank: Generating Finer Single-Document Summarizations},
  author = {Hao Zhang and Jie Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.04649},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

12 pages, accepted by IDEAL2018

R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:04:29.793Z