Topic themes for multi-document summarization Sanda Harabagiu and Finley Lacatusu   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Summarization Abstract The problem of using topic representations for multi-document summarization (MDS) has received considerable attention recently. In this paper, we describe five different topic representations and introduce a novel representation of topics based on topic themes. We present eight different methods of generating MDS and evaluate each of these methods on a large set of topics used in past DUC workshops. Our evaluation results show a significant improvement in the quality of summaries based on topic themes over MDS methods that use other alternative topic representations. BIBTEX @inproceedings{1076071,   author = {Sanda Harabagiu and Finley Lacatusu},   title = {Topic themes for multi-document summarization},   booktitle = {SIGIR '05: Proceedings of the 28th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval},   year = {2005},   isbn = {1-59593-034-5},   pages = {202--209},   location = {Salvador, Brazil},   doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1076034.1076071},   publisher = {ACM Press},   address = {New York, NY, USA},    } ©2006 Association for Computing Machinery