Compressing Multi-document Summaries through Sentence Simplification

Multi-document summarization aims at creating a single summary based on the information conveyed by a collection of texts. After the candidate sentences have been identified and ordered, it is time to select which will be included in the summary. In this paper, we propose an approach that uses sentence simplification, both lexical and syntactic, to help improve the compression step in the summarization process. Simplification is performed by removing specific sentential constructions conveying information that can be considered to be less relevant to the general message of the summary. Thus, the rationale is that sentence simplification not only removes expendable information, but also makes room for further relevant data in a summary.