EdgeSumm: Graph-based framework for automatic text summarization

Abstract

Searching the Internet for a certain topic can become a daunting task because users cannot read and comprehend all the resulting texts. Automatic Text summarization (ATS) in this case is clearly beneficial because manual summarization is expensive and time-consuming. To enhance ATS for single documents, this paper proposes a novel extractive graph-based framework “EdgeSumm” that relies on four proposed algorithms. The first algorithm constructs a new text graph model representation from the input document. The second and third algorithms search the constructed text graph for sentences to be included in the candidate summary. When the resulting candidate summary still exceeds a user-required limit, the fourth algorithm is used to select the most important sentences. EdgeSumm combines a set of extractive ATS methods (namely graph-based, statistical-based, semantic-based, and centrality-based methods) to benefit from their advantages and overcome their individual drawbacks. EdgeSumm is general for any document genre (not limited to a specific domain) and unsupervised so it does not require any training data. The standard datasets DUC2001 and DUC2002 are used to evaluate EdgeSumm using the widely used automatic evaluation tool: Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE). EdgeSumm gets the highest ROUGE scores on DUC2001. For DUC2002, the evaluation results show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art ATS systems by achieving improvements of 1.2% and 4.7% over the highest scores in the literature for the metrics of ROUGE-1 and ROUGE-L respectively. In addition, EdgeSumm achieves very competitive results for the metrics of ROUGE-2 and ROUGE-SU4.