Event phase oriented news summarization

Event summarization is a task to generate a single, concise textual representation of an event. This task does not consider multiple development phases in an event. However, news articles related to long and complicated events often involve multiple phases. Thus, traditional approaches for event summarization generally have difficulty in capturing event phases in summarization effectively. In this paper, we define the task of Event Phase Oriented News Summarization (EPONS). In this approach, we assume that a summary contains multiple timelines, each corresponding to an event phase. We model the semantic relations of news articles via a graph model called Temporal Content Coherence Graph. A structural clustering algorithm EPCluster is designed to separate news articles into several groups corresponding to event phases. We apply a vertex-reinforced random walk to rank news articles. The ranking results are further used to create timelines. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple datasets show the effectiveness of our approach.