JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 7, JULY 2010, ISSN 2151-9617

HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/
WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG 177

Syntactic Trimming of Extracted Sentences

for Improving Extractive Multi-document
Summarization
Kamal Sarkar

Abstract— For managing a vast hoard of online or offline information, summarization can be the useful means because the users can de-
cide about the relevance of an individual document or a document cluster using just summary information. Multi-document summaries can
enable the users to identify the main theme (central idea) of a cluster of texts very rapidly. This paper presents a sentence compression
based summarization technique that uses a number of local and global sentence-trimming rules to improve the performance of an extractive
multi-document summarization system. For our experiments, we develop (1) a primary summarization system, which extracts sentences to
form a draft summary and (2) a trimming component, which accepts a draft summary for revision. The trimming component eliminates the low
content and redundant elements from the sentences in the draft summaries using a number of local and global sentence-trimming rules with-
out hampering the grammaticality and the fluency of the summaries. In effect, the trimming process makes rooms for more diverse and sa-
lient units to appear in a summary. Our test results on DUC 2004 data set show that the summarization system, which integrates both the
extraction component and the trimming component, performs better than some state-of-the art summarization approaches.

Index Terms— Information Overload, Multi-document summarization, Natural Language Processing, Syntactic Trimming

——————————  ——————————

1 INTRODUCTION

T he number of pages available on the web almost

doubles every year. As a result, the search engine in
response to a single query returns a large number of
web pages and it is sometimes very difficult for the users
to go through all the hits and find the relevant informa-
tion from the collection. For managing a vast hoard of infor-
mation, summarization can be a useful means because users can
decide about the relevance of an individual document using just
summary information and multi-document summaries can also
enable users to identify the main theme (central idea) of a clus-
ter of texts very rapidly.
Multi-document summarization is a process, which produces
a condensed representation of the contents of multiple related
text documents collected from heterogeneous sources for hu-
man consumption and facilitates very rapid assimilation by
human beings of the main points from related documents. If
this kind of summarization facility is available on the
web, users may initially summarize a document collection
with the help of a summarization facility and go through
the gist to decide whether to click on the collection for in-
depth study. The major steps of the extractive multi-
document summarization are: (1) extracting important
textual units from multiple related documents, (2) remov-
————————————————
 The author is with the Computer Science & Engineering Department,
Jadavpur University, Kolkata – 700 032, India,
ing redundancies and (3) reordering or fusion of the units
to produce a fluent summary.
Some previous extractive summarization projects [1][2][3]
have used a sentence ranking approach that utilizes a number of
word level and sentence level features such as sentence posi-
tion, term frequency, or cue phrases for ranking sentences. Top-
K sentences are then selected based on a compression
ratio.
In another approach to multi-document summariza-
tion [4], text summarization was viewed as a problem of
summarizing the similarities and differences in informa-
tion content among the documents in a collection.
Redundancy is one of the important issues in multi-
document summarization. To remove redundancy, some
systems select the top most sentence first and measure the
similarity of a next candidate textual unit (sentence or
paragraph) to that of previously selected ones and retain
it only if it contains enough new (dissimilar) information.
A popular such measure is maximal marginal relevance
[5].
Unlike the approach in [5] that uses greedy approach
to sentence selection and redundancy removal, the clus-
tering-based approach controls redundancies in the final
summary by clustering sentences to identify themes of
common information and selecting one or two representa-
tive sentences from each cluster in to the final summary
[6][7].
Centroid-based multi-document summarization [8][9]
ranks sentences based on their similarities to the centroid.
A centroid of a cluster of documents is defined as a pseu-
JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 7, JULY 2010, ISSN 2151-9617
HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/
WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG
do-document consisting of words with TF*IDF scores
greater than a threshold, where TF means term frequency
which has been computed by the average number of oc-
currences of a word across a set of the documents to be
summarized and IDF (inverse document frequency) signi-
fying the rarity of a word in a text corpus, is inversely
proportional to the document frequency of a word. Doc-
ument frequency of a word is defined as the number of
documents that contain the word. Document frequency is
the corpus statistics of a word and computed on a large
collection of documents.
Few approaches identify repetitive phrases from a
cluster of documents and use information fusion tech-
niques to form a fluent summary [10]. In extractive multi-
document summarization task, summary sentences come
from multiple source documents, and picking sentences
out of context may result in an incoherent summary. So,
to increase the readability of the produced summary,
most systems follow time order and text order (passages
from the oldest text appear first, sorted in the order in
which they appear in the input texts) [11]. Approaches in
[12] use temporal and coherence constraints to order sen-
tences.
The most summarization systems are either (1) sen-
tence extraction based or (2) using sentence extraction as a
primary component of a system. Sentence extraction is
only the first half of the summarization problem. It was
shown in [13] that the revisions of multi-document sum-
maries improve summary coherence. Some other re-
searches have also focused on the possibility of improv-
ing summarization performance through summary revi-
sions [14]. Lin [15] presents a pilot study on improving
the sentence extraction based summarization perfor-
mance by sentence compression. This pilot study reveals
that local optimization at sentence level even using a
good compression algorithm proposed by Knight and
Marcu [16] is not enough to boost a system performance
because the basic goal is to find the best compressed
summaries not the best compressed sentences. They con-
clude that global cross sentence optimization may boost a
system performance, but they did not present any global
optimization method in their paper. A basic element (BE)
-based sentence compression algorithm has been dis-
cussed in [17].
Compared to the extractive summarization approaches
discussed above, our summarization system has one ad-
ditional component, which we call trimming component.
In effect, our system consists of two major components:
(1) a sentence extraction component that extracts sen-
tences to form a draft summary and (2) a trimming com-
ponent that applies local and global syntactic trimming
rules to a draft summary for improvement. The local
trimming rules eliminate unimportant elements from the
individual sentences and the global trimming rules elimi-
nate phrase level redundancy across the summary sen-
tences. Thus, the trimming makes rooms for the more
diverse and salient information to appear in a summary.
In our approach, the draft summaries are tagged by a
part-of-speech (POS) tagger [18] before their submission
to the trimming component. Some early works focus on
178
local sentence compression methods [19] that use the
parsed sentences as input to a trimmer. Since the com-
plete parsing of a group of sentences takes more time
than the tagging time of the same and the trimming quali-
ty is affected by a parser’s parsing quality (which may
differ from one parser to another), we use the shallow
parsing on a POS tagged output before applying the
trimming rules.
The BE (basic elements)-based sentence compression
[17] algorithm also requires parsing of the sentences and
breaking sentences in to a number of basic elements using
BE package [20]. Compared to the BE-based sentence
compression algorithm that concentrates only on remov-
ing the redundant BEs (basic elements) from a summary,
our summary compression algorithm eliminates unim-
portant portions of the individual sentences and phrase
level redundancy across the summary sentences.
Recently, a sentence trimming based summary revi-
sion approach has been presented in [21], where authors
have shown an improvement in the performance of the
multi-document summarization through sentence trim-
ming, but comparisons with state-of-the art summariza-
tion approaches have not been presented. Moreover, they
have evaluated the summaries with the help of old ver-
sion of ROUGE packages (ROUGEeval-1.4.2).
The work described in this paper is an improvement
over our previous work presented in [21]. Compared to
our previous work, the present work use a simple ap-
proach for sentence extraction and apply more number of
trimming rules to show that the proposed trimming com-
ponent can be connected to the output of a simple extrac-
tive summarizer for improved summarization perfor-
mance which is comparable to the performance of various
state-of- the art summarization systems. We evaluate
summaries using the ROUGE package version 1.5.5.
In the section 2 we describe a sentence extraction me-
thod, which we use to implement our primary summari-
zation system for draft summary generation. The pro-
posed syntactic trimming component has been covered in
section 3. The experiments and results are discussed in
section 4.
2 SENTENCE EXTRACTION METHOD
We re-implement a centroid based sentence extraction
method [8] for draft summary generation. Our imple-
mentation of the centroid based sentence extraction me-
thod consists of a number of steps: (1) Document prepro-
cessing (2) sentence ranking (3) draft summary genera-
tion.
2.1 Preprocessing
The preprocessing task primarily includes handling
abbreviations or numeric words containing dots (.) in it.
The dots in abbreviations and numeric words (ex. 12.5
millions) may mistakenly be recognized as a sentence
boundary. We have used a number of syntactic rules to
differentiate between dots in abbreviations, numeric
words and dots at the end of a sentence. We also use a
list of the predefined abbreviations to prevent sentences
JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 7, JULY 2010, ISSN 2151-9617
HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/
WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG
from being mistakenly broken at the dots used in the ab-
breviations.
Before applying sentence-ranking algorithm, input
documents are broken in to a cluster of sentences.
2.2 Sentence Ranking
After the input documents are formatted and seg-
mented, the sentences are ranked based on two important
features: similarity to the centroid and the positional in-
formation. These two important features have successful-
ly been incorporated into the extractive multi-document
summarizer called MEAD [9].
Centroid
A centroid is a pseudo-document consisting of words
with TF*IDF scores greater than a predefined threshold
and TF ( term frequency ) = Average occurrences of a
word across the input collection of the documents to be
summarized and IDF (Inverse Document Frequency) is
computed on a corpus using the formula: IDF=log(N/df)
where N=number of documents in the corpus and df
(document frequency) indicates the number of documents
in which a word occurs. The centroid score of a sentence
Ck is computed as the sum of the centroid values of all
words in a sentence.
Ck  C w
w, k
where Cw,k is a centroid value of a word w in a sen-
tence k.
Positional Value
The positional value is computed as follows: the first
sentence gets the highest score and as the sentence num-
ber increases, the positional value decreases. The posi-
tional value for the sentence k is computed using follow-
ing formula:
1
Pk 
k trimming, the tagged draft summaries are scanned from
Combining Parameters for Sentence Ranking
We compute the sentence score using the linear combina-
tion of the two parameters: centroid and the positional
value. We use the following formula for combining these
two parameters.
S c o re ( S k )   ( C k C m ax )   Pk
where Cmax indicates the centroid score of a sentence
which gets the maximum centroid score in an input col-
lection of sentences. For our experiments, we set:  = 
=1.
2.3 Draft Summary Generation
In our summarization approach, the draft summaries
produced by the extraction component become input to
179
the trimming component. The draft summaries are pro-
duced after ranking the sentences based on their scores
and selecting K-top ranked sentences. In the process of
draft summary generation, system selects first the top
ranked sentence and continues choosing sentences until
the desired summary length is reached. While selecting a
sentence, it is compared to the already selected sentences
to verify whether this sentence contain sufficient dissimi-
lar information. To do so, a similarity between the sen-
tences under consideration and the already selected sen-
tences should be measured. If in any case it is found that
the similarity value is greater than a predefined threshold
value, the sentence under consideration is not included in
to a summary.
The cosine similarity metric is used to measure the si-
milarity between two sentences. If the cosine similarity
between two sentences is greater (less) than a threshold,
we say that the sentences are similar (dissimilar). The co-
sine similarity between two sentences is measured by the
following formula as stated in [22].
idf-modified-cosine(x,y) =
2
 x , y tf , x tf , y (idf )
2 2
 xi x (tf xi , x idf xi )   yi  y (tf yi , y idf yi )
where t f  , S is the number of occurrences of the
word  in the sentence S.
We generate a draft summary of 200 words with the
target of generating the final summary of 665 bytes (ap-
proximately 100 words).
3 PROPOSED SYNTACTIC TRIMMING METHOD
The size of a draft summary is fixed to 200 words and
all the draft summaries generated by the sentence extrac-
tion component are tagged by a POS tagger. Then the
trimming rules are applied one by one on the tagged draft
summaries for revising them. From a trimmed draft
summary, a final summary of 665 bytes is generated. For
top to bottom and the trimming rules are tried on one
sentence at a time.
We categorize the trimming rules as local and global
trimming rules. When we remove low content words
from a sentence, we call it as local trimming and when we
remove a redundant constituent from a sentence in con-
sultation with other sentences in a draft summary we call
it as global trimming.
3.1 Local Trimming
The local trimming rules and their application to the
English sentences are shown below (Rules are written in
italics font and numbered as R1, R2 etc.).
R1: Delete time words such as "Monday" and time expres-
sions such as "on Monday".
The following patterns of low significant time words
JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 7, JULY 2010, ISSN 2151-9617
HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/
WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG
have been identified from the news corpus.
<Prep + Day> (Ex. On Sunday)
<Day> (Ex. Sunday)
<Day + night> (Ex. Sunday night)
<prep + late+ Day > (Ex. By late Sunday)
<since + last+ Day> (Ex. since last Tuesday)
Besides the above-mentioned patterns, the following time word
sequences have also been identified from the corpus.
“last year", "last week", "last month", "the first time", “next
month” , “this year”
R2: Remove low content adverbs from the sentences
The tagger assigns the tag <RB> for the adverb. We
identified few exceptions where this rule should not be
applicable. Some words such as “ago”, “well”, “earlier”,
“before”, “not”, are tagged as <RB>, but they should not
be deleted to maintain the fluency of a summary
The constituents to be deleted in the following exam-
ple is shown in bold italic.
Tagged input:
[Portuguese/JJ writer/NN who/WP took/VBD up/IN
literature/NN relatively/RB late/JJ in/IN life/NN
and/CC whose/WP$ richly/RB imaginative/JJ no-
vels/NNS soon/RB won/VBD him/PRP a/DT follow-
ing/VBG of/IN loyal/JJ. . .]
After application of rule R2:
[Portuguese/JJ writer/NN who/WP took/VBD up/IN
literature/NN late/JJ in/IN life/NN and/CC
whose/WP$ imaginative/JJ novels/NNS won/VBD
him/PRP a/DT following/VBG of/IN loyal/JJ . . .]
R3: Remove adjectives with idf <2.5 from the noun phrase if
the noun phrase contains more than 2 keywords. Here idf
means inverse document frequency (used in traditional infor-
mation settings). The DFA used for identifying noun phrases
in shown in Fig-1.
Adjective
Start Noun
Article
Fig. 1 DFA for noun phrase identification
180
Tagged Input:
[But/CC with/IN exorbitant/JJ salaries/NNS
paid/VBN to/TO several/JJ unproven/JJ stars/NNS
over/IN the/DT last/JJ few/JJ years/NNS and/CC
100/CD million/CD deals/NNS sprouting/VB…]
After Application of the rule R3A:
[But/CC with/IN exorbitant/JJ salaries/NNS
paid/VBN to/TO unproven/JJ stars/NNS over/IN
the/DT few/JJ years/NNS and/CC 100/CD mil-
lion/CD deals/NNS sprouting/VB…]
R4: Delete the information source (such as a “spokesman
said today”) appears at the end of a sentence with the pattern
<comma+ segment + dot>, where segment do not contain any
named entity, but it contains words such as “reported”, “said”
etc..
The segment indicating news source information
usually starts with a comma (,) and ends with a period (.).
This segment is more distinctly identified by a list of do-
main specific keywords and phrases such as “reported”,
“announced”, “ according to”, “officials said”
R5: If a sentence starts with a PP with the pattern <IN +
NP + Comma>, delete it if noun heads in the PP are
lightweight. Here the tag <IN> indicates preposition and NP
indicates noun phrase.
Here, lightweight means the weight is less than a thre-
shold (2.2 in this setting) and PP means prepositional
phrase, NP means noun phrase.
Tagged input:
[In/IN an/DT almost/RB casual/JJ fashion/NN,/, the/DT
document/NN seems/VBZ to/TO confirm/VB two/CD
of/IN the/DT central/JJ charges/NNS of/IN the/DT feder-
al/JJ case/NN against/IN bin/NN Laden/NNP.]
After application of Rule R5:
[the/DT document/NN seems/VBZ to/TO con-
firm/VB two/CD of/IN the/DT central/JJ
charges/NNS of/IN the/DT federal/JJ case/NN
against/IN bin/NN Laden/NNP.
3.2 Global Trimming
Modifiers are used before or after the named entities
such as person name, organization name and location
name. The noun phrases also contain modifier terms
such as adjectives, adverbs. The modifier terms may re-
peat (partly or in-full) in a summary along with the units
(such as a named entity (NE) or a noun phrase (NP)) they
are modifying. The redundant information found in such
cases can be deleted with minimum loss of information
and without loss of grammaticality. We consider the
modifier terms as candidates for global trimming and the
parts of modifiers can be eliminated if it is already found
in the previously selected sentences. Before applying
trimming rules, the modifier terms should be identified
JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 7, JULY 2010, ISSN 2151-9617
HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/
WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG
carefully to maintain grammaticality. We apply different
syntactic rules to identify modifier terms from the noun
phrases and from the surroundings of the named entities.
So, we have two types of global trimming: Named Entity
centric sentence trimming and sentence trimming by
thinning noun phrases.
Named Entity Centric Trimming
Named Entity centric trimming has three steps: named
entity identification and identification of modifiers sur-
rounding named entities and Formation of trimming
rules
A word with tag <NNP> (which is used by the tagger
to indicate proper noun) has been considered as a part of
a named entity and a sequence of words tagged with
<NNP> constitutes a named entity. For example, the
phrase, “former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet”, is
tagged by the tagger as “former/JJ Chilean/JJ dicta-
tor/NN Augusto/NNP Pinochet/NNP” and “Augus-
to/NNP Pinochet/NNP” constitutes a named entity since
it is a sequence of NNPs.
In our work, we consider a noun phrase having named
entity (NE) at the head as a named entity phrase (NEP).
An example of NEP is “former Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet”, where “Augusto Pinochet” is a named entity
which is at the head of NEP.
We divide NEP into two parts as <modifier+ NE >.
But, sometimes it may happen that a very common word
(such as "President") appears as a part of NEP since the
tagger assigns the tag <NNP> to label it. To handle this
situation, we convert the word to lowercase and check the
idf value of this word. If the word is found in the vocabu-
lary and idf value is <2.5, we consider this word as a part
of the modifier, otherwise we consider it as a part of the
named entity. The procedure to identify a modifier and
named entity works as follows:
Say, A is the left most word and H is a head - word in
a NEP. Scan NEP from right to left checking NNPs and
stop exactly when we encounter a non-NNP or a NNP
with idf value<2.5. Say, we stop at such a word X. Then
we consider the segment spanning from the word A to
the word X as modifier and the rest of the NEP is consi-
dered as a NE.
A modifier of a named entity may appear in an anoth-
er form which is called “noun in apposition” and this
form of modifier are extracted using syntactical patterns
<NE, M, > or <NE, M. >, where M is the modifier and NE
is the named entity. Rule for named entity centric phrase
trimming is as follows:
R6A: Delete the modifier of a named entity in its current
mention in a sentence if the modifier of its current mention is
similar to one of modifiers of its early mentions in already-
scanned sentences.
To apply the above rule, we maintain a list of modifi-
ers for each mention of a named entity covered in the
previously selected sentences while scanning a draft
summary from top to bottom. Two modifiers are taken to
be similar when the term based similarity between them
181
is greater than a threshold value (which is 0.5 in our set-
ting). Similarity between two modifiers M1 and M2 is cal-
culated as follows:
Sim(M1,M2)= (2*|M1 M2| ) / (|M1|+|M2|)
Articles and prepositions (if any) are removed while
measuring similarity between two modifiers.
Tagged input:
(Candidate segment for trimming is shown in bold
italics and the similar phrase found in the previously
scanned sentences is shown in bold only)
[Saudi/NNP exile/NN Osama/NNP bin/NN La-
den/NNP ,/, the/DT alleged/VBN mastermind/NN
…]
[ …newspaper/NN interview/NN of/IN Afghanis-
tan/NNP -/: based/VBN Saudi/NNP billionaire/NN
Osama/NNP bin/NN Laden/NNP who/WP has/VBZ
been/VBN accused/VBN…]
After application of rule R6A:
[...Saudi/NNP exile/NN Osama/NNP bin/NN La-
den/NNP ,/, the/DT alleged/VBN mastermind/NN ...]
[.... interview/NN of/IN Laden/NNP who/WP
has/VBZ been/VBN accused/VBN. . .]
In the above example, “Saudi/NNP exile/NN Osa-
ma/NNP bin/NN Laden/NNP” and “Afghanistan/NNP
-/: based/VBN Saudi/NNP billionaire/NN Osama/NNP
bin/NN Laden/NNP” are the two sentence segments,
which are basically named entity phrases (NEP). These
two NEPs contain the same named entity (assuming that
consecutive NNPs represents a named entity) “Laden” at
their heads. So, our system divides first segment in to a
modifier “Saudi exile Osama bin” and a head named enti-
ty “Laden” and second segment in to the modifier “Afg-
hanistan based Saudi billionaire Osama bin” and a head
named entity “Laden”. According to similarity metric
mentioned above, similarity between two modifiers is
>0.5. So, the modifier of the entity “Laden” in the second
sentence has been deleted according to the rule R6A.
R6B: If any NP matches completely (word by word) with
the modifier of a NEP already seen in the previously scanned
sentences, replace the NP with NE head of the NEP.
Tagged input:
[. . . the/DT trial/NN of/IN Malaysian/NNP for-
mer/JJ deputy/NN prime/JJ minister/NN An-
war/NNP Ibrahim/NNP on/IN charges/NNS of/IN
corruption/NN. . .]
[. . . his/PRP$ concerns/NNS about/IN the/DT ar-
rest/NN of/IN Malaysian/NNP former/JJ deputy/NN
prime/JJ minister/NN ./.]
After application of Rule6B:
JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 7, JULY 2010, ISSN 2151-9617
HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/
WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG
[. . . the/DT trial/NN of/IN Malaysian/NNP for-
mer/JJ deputy/NN prime/JJ minister/NN An-
war/NN Ibrahim/NNP on/IN charges/NNS of/IN
corruption/NN. . .]
[. . .his/PRP$ concerns/NNS about/IN the/DT ar-
rest/NN of/IN Anwar/NNP Ibrahim/NNP]
Simple NP Trimming
We trim the noun phrases containing a named entity at
their heads using Named Entity centric trimming rules
discussed above. But, we treat differently with the noun
phrases having no named entity at their heads. In this
case, we consider the trailing non-noun words (adjectives
and adverbs) of a noun phrase as modifier terms if the
length of the NP is >2 and the distance between the word
and the noun head is >=2. The distance between two
phrasal words is measured by position of the head-word
in the phrase minus position of a word in the phrase. Po-
sition value of a word in a phrase increases from left to
right of the phrase. The noun words satisfying above syn-
tactical constraints is considered as a modifier words if idf
value of the word is <2.5. The low idf value of the word
signifies that the word is very common in the text corpus.
The NP trimming rule is as follows.
R7A: If A is a NP in a sentence S and Bi is one of NPs be-
longing to the list of noun phrases found in the already-scanned
sentences and head (A)=head (Bi), delete the modifier words of
A, which matches with that of Bi
Tagged input:
(Candidate segment for trimming is shown in bold
italics and the similar phrase in the previously revised
sentence is shown in bold only)
[ . . .to/TO launch/VB the/DT first/JJ component/NN
of/IN a/DT multibillion/JJ dollar/NN internation-
al/JJ space/NN station/NN after/IN a/DT year/NN
of/IN delay/NN]
[The/DT first/JJ part/NN of/IN the/DT internation-
al/JJ space/NN station/NN was/VBD smoothly/RB
orbiting/VBG . . .]
After application of Rule R7A:
[. . . to/TO launch/VB the/DT first/JJ component/NN
of/IN a/DT multibillion/JJ dollar/NN internation-
al/JJ space/NN station/NN after/IN a/DT year/NN
of/IN delay/NN]
[The/DT first/JJ part/NN of/IN the/DT space/NN sta-
tion/NN was/VBD smoothly/RB orbiting/VBG . . .]
R7B: Trim noun phrases of the pattern <CD + X>, where
CD is the tag for numeric value and X indicates common nouns
specifying human beings. We assume a predetermined list of
words such as “people”, “persons”, ”soldiers” etc. for X.
Tagged Input:
182
At/IN least/JJS 32/CD people/NNS were/VBD
killed/VBN and/CC widespread/JJ flooding/NN
prompted/VBD more/JJR than/IN 150/CD,/,000/CD
to/TO seek/VB higher/JJR ground/NN ./.
After Application of the rule R7B:
At/IN least/JJS 32/CD were/VBD killed/VBN
and/CC widespread/JJ flooding/NN prompted/VBD
more/JJR than/IN 150/CD,/, 000/CD to/TO seek/VB
higher/JJR ground/NN ./.
4 EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS
For comparing system-generated summaries to refer-
ence summaries, we use an automatic summary evalua-
tion tool, ROUGE (Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gist-
ing Evaluation, version 1.5.5) [23][24] developed by the
Information Science Institute at the University of South-
ern California. ROUGE is an automated tool, which com-
pares a generated summary from an automated system
with one or more ideal summaries. The ideal summaries
are called models. ROUGE is based on n-gram overlap
between the system-produced and reference summaries.
ROUGE was used in the 2004 and 2005 Document Under-
standing Conferences (DUC) (National Institute of Stan-
dards and Technology (NIST), 2005) as the evaluation
tool. We consider ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2 and ROUGE-SU4
average_F scores to measure the performance of each
summarizer. ROUGE-1 evaluates unigram based overlap
between the system produced and reference summaries,
ROUGE-2 evaluates bigram co-occurrence while ROUGE-
SU4 evaluates ‘‘skip bigrams,’’ which are pairs of words
(in sentence order) having intervening word gaps no
larger than 4 words1.
We chose as our input data the document sets used in
the task2 in the Document Understanding Conference
(DUC) in 2004. Task2 in DUC 2004 was designed to eva-
luate short multi-document summary generation. This
collection contains 50 test document sets, each with ap-
proximately 10 news stories. For each document set, four
human-generated summaries are provided for the target
length of 665 bytes (approximately 100 words).
In our experiment, for each input data set, a draft summary
of 200 words is generated by the sentence extraction me-
thod discussed in section 2. Then, all the draft summaries
are tagged by the POS tagger. The trimming rules dis-
cussed in section 3 are then applied one by one to the sen-
tences in each draft summary. After trimming and resiz-
ing a draft summary for each document set, a final sum-
mary of 665 bytes is selected from the trimmed draft
summary. The results of the evaluation of the overall
summarization performance using ROUGE package (ver-
sion 1.5.5) are shown in table 1, table 2 and table 3. We
show three of the ROUGE scores as our experimental results:
ROUGE-1 (unigram-based), ROUGE-2 (bigram-based), and
ROUGE-SU4 (skip bigram) metric. The summarization per-
formances before trimming and after trimming are shown
1 ROUGE-1.5.5 version with arguments: -n 2 -x -m -2 4
-u -b 665
JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 7, JULY 2010, ISSN 2151-9617
HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/
WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG
separately in the tables in terms of ROUGE scores.
The proposed system has been compared with the
best system (peer65) and one baseline system (the lead
baseline) participated in DUC 2004 on task 2. The Lead
baseline simply takes the first 665 bytes of the most recent
news article in a document cluster as a summary.
We can see from the table 1-3 that our system outperforms
the top performing system and the baseline system on task2 of
DUC 2004 over all three ROUGE metrics.
TABLE 1
ROUGE-1 SYSTEMS COMPARISON ON DUC 2004 DATASET
183
be improved by using local and global trimming rules.
We have used only syntactic trimming rules to eliminate
less important or redundant constituents of the summary
sentences.
The more improvement in the overall summarization
performance can be possible by introducing new trim-
ming rules, which will be used to compress a draft sum-
mary without hampering the gramaticality and the fluen-
cy of the summary. We hope that the trimming compo-
nent proposed in this paper may be used as a plug-in
component at the output of any sentence extraction based
summarizer to boost up its summarization performance.

System ROUGE-1 95% conf. interval

Our system 0.38982 (0.38400-0.39583)
(Sentence Ex- References
traction
+Trimming) 1. P. B. Baxendale, “Man-made index for technical literature—An
experiment”, IBM Journal of Research and Development,
Sentence Ex- 0.37620 (0.37068-0.38182) 2(4):354–361, 1958.
traction 2. H. P. Edmundson, “New methods in automatic extracting”,
Peer 65 0.37928 (0.37381-0.38437 Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery,
16(2):264–285, 1969.
Lead baseline 0.32106 (0.31539-0.32648) 3. H. P. Luhn, “The automatic creation of literature abstracts”, IBM
Journal of Research Development, 2(2):159–165, 1958.
4. I. Mani and E. Bloedorn, “Summarizing Similarities and Differ-
ences among Related Documents”, Journal of Information re-
trieval, pp-35-67, 1999.
TABLE 2 5. J. G. Carbonell and J. Goldstein, “The use of MMR, diversity-
ROUGE-2 SYSTEMS COMPARISON ON DUC 2004 DATASET based re-ranking for reordering documents and producing sum-
maries”, In Proceedings of the 21st Annual International ACM
System
ROUGE-2 95% conf. interval SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information
Our system Retrieval, Melbourne, Australia, pages 335–336, 1998.
6. K. McKeown, J. Klavans, V. Hatzivassiloglou, R. Barzilay,
(Sentence Ex- 0.09641 (0.09227 -.10080) and E. Eskin, “Towards multi-document summarization by
traction reformulation: Progress and prospects”, In Proceedings of the
+Trimming) 16th National Conference of the American Association for
Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-1999), 18–22 July, pages 453–
Sentence Ex- 0.09179 (0.08779-0.09565)
460, 1999.
traction 7. D. Marcu, and L. Gerber, “An inquiry into the nature of multi-
Peer 65 0.09162 (0.08746-0.09581) document abstracts, extracts, and their evaluation”, In Proceed-
ings of the NAACL-2001 Workshop on Automatic Summariza-
tion, Pittsburgh, June. NAACL, pages 1–8, 2001.
Lead baseline 0.06386 (0.05985-0.06786)
8. D. R. Radev, H. Jing and M. Budzikowska, “Centroid-based
summarization of multiple documents: Sentence extraction, utili-
ty-based evaluation, and user studies”, In ANLP/NAACL
Workshop on Summarization, Seattle, April, 2000.
9. D. R. Radev, H. Jing, M. Sty and D. Tam, “Centroid-based
summarization of multiple documents”, Inf. Process. Manage-
TABLE 3 ment, 40(6): 919-938, 2004.
ROUGE-SU4 SYSTEMS COMPARISON ON DUC 2004 DATASET 10. R. Barzilay, K. McKeown and M. Elhadad, “Information fusion
System ROUGE-SU4 95% conf. interval in the context of multi-document summarization”, In Proceed-
ings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computa-
Our system 0.14084 (0.13707-0.14468) tional Linguistics, College Park, MD, 20–26 June, pages 550–
(Sentence Ex- 557, 1999.
traction 11. R. Barzilay, M. Elhadad, and K. McKeown, “Sentence ordering
+Trimming) in multi-document summarization”, In Proceedings of the Hu-
Sentence Extrac- man Language Technology Conference, 2001.
0.13329 (0.12984-0.13681)
12. R. Barzilay, M. Elhadad, and K. McKeown, “Sentence ordering
tion in multi-document summarization”, In Proceedings of the Hu-
Peer 65 0.13227 (0.12883-0.13579) man Language Technology Conference, 2001.
0.10233 (0.09930-0.10536) 13. J. Otterbacher, D. R. Radev, and A. Lu, “Revisions that improve
Lead baseline cohesion in multi-document summaries: A preliminary study”,
In ACL Workshop on Text Summarization, Philadelphia, 2002.
14. I. Mani, G. Barbara and B. Eric, “Improving summaries by re-
vising them”, In Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 99), College
5 CONCLUSION Park, MD, June, pages 558–565, 1999.
15. C. Lin,, “Improving Summarization Performance by Sentence
In this paper, we have shown that the multi-document Compression- A Pilot Study”, In the Proceedings of the Sixth In-
summaries produced by a sentence extraction method can
JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 7, JULY 2010, ISSN 2151-9617
HTTPS://SITES.GOOGLE.COM/SITE/JOURNALOFCOMPUTING/
WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG 184
ternational Workshop on Information Retrieval with Asian Lan-
guage (IRAL 2003), Sapporo, Japan, July 7,2003

16. K. Knight and D. Marcu, “Statistics-Based summarization- Step

One: Sentence Compression”, In Proceedings of AAAI-2000,
Austin, TX, USA, 2000.
17. E. Hovy, C. Lin and L. Zhou, “A BE-based Multi-document
summarizer with sentence compression”, In Proceedings of Mul-
tilingual Summarization Evaluation (ACL 2005 workshop), Ann
Arbor, MI.
18. H. Liu, “MontyLingua: An end-to-end natural language proces-
sor with common sense”, Available at:
web.media.mit.edu/~hugo/montylingua, retrieved in 2004.
19. B. Dorr, D. Zajic and R. Schwartz, “Hedge trimmer: A parse-
and-trim approach to headline generation”, In Proceedings of the
HLT/NAACL 2003 Text Summarization Workshop and Docu-
ment Understand ing Conference (DUC 2003), pp. 1–8, Edmon-
ton, Alberta, 2003.
20. E. Hovy, J. Fukumoto, C.-Y. Lin and L. Zhou. 2005: basic Ele-
ments. http://www.isi.edu/~cyl/BE
21. K. Sarkar, “Improving Multi-document Test Summarization Per-
formance Using Local and Global Trimming”, In proceedings
of intelligent Human Computer Interaction,
,IIIT,Allahabad,India, pp- 272 –282, 2009
22. G.Erkan and D.R. Radev, “LexRank: Graph-based Lexical Cen-
trality as Salience in Text Summarization’, Journal of Artificial
Intelligence Research (JAIR)”, Volume 22, pages 457-479,
2004.
23. C.-Y. Lin and E. Hovy, “Automatic evaluation of summaries
using n-gram co-occurrence”, In Proceedings of 2003 Language
Technology Conference (HLT-NAACL 2003), Edmton, Canada,
May 27 - June 1, 2003.
24. C.Y. Lin, “ROUGE: A package for automatic evaluation of
summaries”, In WAS 2004: Proceedings of the Workshop on
Text Summarization Branches Out, July 25–26, Barcelona,
2004.

Kamal Sarkar received B.E degree in Computer Science and Engi-

neering from the Faculty of Engineering, Jadavpur University in
1996. He received the M.E degree from the same University in 1999.
From 2001, he is working as a reader in the Department of Comput-
er Science and Engineering, Jadavpur University. He is a member of
the Association of Computer Electronics and Electrical Engineers
(ACEEE). His research interests are in Text Summarization, Natural
Language Processing, Machine Learning, Web mining, knowledge
discovery from text data.