Exploiting local and global performance of candidate systems for aggregation of summarization techniques

Abstract: With an ever growing number of extractive summarization techniques being proposed, there is less clarity then ever about how good each system is compared to the rest. Several studies highlight the variance in performance of these systems with change in datasets or even across documents within the same corpus. An effective way to counter this variance and to make the systems more robust could be to use inputs from multiple systems when generating a summary. In the present work, we define a novel way of creating such ensemble by exploiting similarity between the content of candidate summaries to estimate their reliability. We define GlobalRank which captures the performance of a candidate system on an overall corpus and LocalRank which estimates its performance on a given document cluster. We then use these two scores to assign a weight to each individual systems, which is then used to generate the new aggregate ranking. Experiments on DUC2003 and DUC 2004 datasets show a significant improvement in terms of ROUGE score, over existing sate-of-art techniques.