Multi‐document summarization of news articles using an event‐based framework

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to develop a method for automatic construction of multi‐document summaries of sets of news articles that might be retrieved by a web search engine in response to a user query. Design/methodology/approach – Based on the cross‐document discourse analysis, an event‐based framework is proposed for integrating and organizing information extracted from different news articles. It has a hierarchical structure in which the summarized information is presented at the top level and more detailed information given at the lower levels. A tree‐view interface was implemented for displaying a multi‐document summary based on the framework. A preliminary user evaluation was performed by comparing the framework‐based summaries against the sentence‐based summaries. Findings – In a small evaluation, all the human subjects preferred the framework‐based summaries to the sentence‐based summaries. It indicates that the event‐based framework is an effective way to summarize a set of news articles reporting an event or a series of relevant events. Research limitations/implications – Limited to event‐based news articles only, not applicable to news critiques and other kinds of news articles. A summarization system based on the event‐based framework is being implemented. Practical implications – Multi‐document summarization of news articles can adopt the proposed event‐based framework. Originality/value – An event‐based framework for summarizing sets of news articles was developed and evaluated using a tree‐view interface for displaying such summaries.