A Temporally Sensitive Submodularity Framework for Timeline Summarization

Sebastian Martschat, Katja Markert


Abstract
Timeline summarization (TLS) creates an overview of long-running events via dated daily summaries for the most important dates. TLS differs from standard multi-document summarization (MDS) in the importance of date selection, interdependencies between summaries of different dates and by having very short summaries compared to the number of corpus documents. However, we show that MDS optimization models using submodular functions can be adapted to yield well-performing TLS models by designing objective functions and constraints that model the temporal dimension inherent in TLS. Importantly, these adaptations retain the elegance and advantages of the original MDS models (clear separation of features and inference, performance guarantees and scalability, little need for supervision) that current TLS-specific models lack.
Anthology ID:
K18-1023
Volume:
Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
Month:
October
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, Ivan Titov
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
SIGNLL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
230–240
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/K18-1023
DOI:
10.18653/v1/K18-1023
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sebastian Martschat and Katja Markert. 2018. A Temporally Sensitive Submodularity Framework for Timeline Summarization. In Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pages 230–240, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Temporally Sensitive Submodularity Framework for Timeline Summarization (Martschat & Markert, CoNLL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/K18-1023.pdf