News Stream Summarization using Burst Information Networks

Tao Ge1, Lei Cui2, Baobao Chang3, Sujian Li3, Ming Zhou4, Zhifang Sui5
1Key Laboratory of Computational Linguistics, Peking University, 2Microsoft Research, 3Peking University, 4microsoft research asia, 5


Abstract

This paper studies summarizing key information from news streams. We propose simple yet effective models to solve the problem based on a novel and promising representation of text streams -- Burst Information Networks (BINets). A BINet can be aware of redundant information, allows global analysis of a text stream, and can be efficiently built and dynamically updated, which perfectly fits the demands of text stream summarization. Extensive experiments show that the BINet-based approaches are not only efficient and can be used in a real-time online summarization setting, but also can generate high-quality summaries, outperforming the state-of-the-art approach.