An effective sentence-extraction technique using contextual information and statistical approaches for text summarization

This paper proposes an effective method to extract salient sentences using contextual information and statistical approaches for text summarization. The proposed method combines two consecutive sentences into a bi-gram pseudo sentence so that contextual information is applied to statistical sentence-extraction techniques. Salient bi-gram pseudo sentences are first selected by the statistical sentence-extraction techniques, and then each selected bi-gram pseudo sentence is separated into two single sentences. The second sentence-extraction task for the separated single sentences is performed to make a final text summary. Because the proposed method uses the contextual information with the bi-gram pseudo sentences and combines the statistical sentence-extraction techniques effectively, it can achieve high performance. As a result, the proposed method showed better performance than other sentence-extraction methods in both single- and multi-document summarization. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.