Optimizing Sentence Modeling and Selection for Document Summarization

Extractive document summarization aims to conclude given documents by extracting some salient sentences. Often, it faces two challenges: 1) how to model the information redundancy among candidate sentences; 2) how to select the most appropriate sentences. This paper attempts to build a strong summarizer DivSelect+CNNLM by presenting new algorithms to optimize each of them. Concretely, it proposes CNNLM, a novel neural network language model (NNLM) based on convolutional neural network (CNN), to project sentences into dense distributed representations, then models sentence redundancy by cosine similarity. Afterwards, it formulates the selection process as an optimization problem, constructing a diversified selection process (DivSelect) with the aim of selecting some sentences which have high prestige, meantime, are dissimilar with each other. Experimental results on DUC2002 and DUC2004 benchmark data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.