We propose an abstraction-based multi-document summarization framework that
can construct new sentences by exploring more fine-grained syntactic units than
sentences, namely, noun/verb phrases. Different from existing abstraction-based
approaches, our method first constructs a pool of concepts and facts
represented by phrases from the input documents. Then new sentences are
generated by selecting and merging informative phrases to maximize the salience
of phrases and meanwhile satisfy the sentence construction constraints. We
employ integer linear optimization for conducting phrase selection and merging
simultaneously in order to achieve the global optimal solution for a summary.
Experimental results on the benchmark data set TAC 2011 show that our framework
outperforms the state-of-the-art models under automated pyramid evaluation
metric, and achieves reasonably well results on manual linguistic quality
evaluation.

我们提出了一种基于抽象的多文档摘要框架，可以通过探索比句子更细粒度的句法单元（即名词 / 动词短语）来构建新的句子。与现有的基于抽象的方法不同，我们的方法首先构建了一个由输入文档中的短语表示的概念和事实池。然后通过选择和合并信息短语生成新的句子，以最大化短语的显著性并同时满足句子构造约束。我们采用整数线性优化来同时进行短语选择和合并，以实现摘要的全局最优解。在基准数据集 TAC 2011 上进行的实验结果表明，我们的框架在自动金字塔评估度量标准下优于最先进的模型，并在手动语言质量评估上取得了相当好的结果。