A Tree-Position Kernel for Document Compression

We describe our entry into the DUC 2004 automatic document summarization competition. We competed only in the single document, headline generation task. Our system is based on a novel kernel dubbed the tree position kernel, combined with two other well-known kernels. Our system performs well on white-box evaluations, but does very poorly in the overall DUC evaluation. However, the latter results are offset by the fact that baseline systems consistently outperform well engineered systems.