MDS: Multi Document Summarization

funded by the German Ministry for Economy and Technology (BMWi)

project management: Professor Dr. Manfred Stede
staff: Heike Bieler, Martin Nelk
duration: april 2008 - march 2010

In the MDS project, we develope a prototypical multi-document summarization system. We are working with German news texts. The idea is to summarize events that are described in multiple online news sources and maybe over a longer time span. The user of the system can gather all accumulated relevant information about this event by reading only one text.

In this project we use the results of the SUMMaR project. This provides modules for single document summarization by combining linguistic and statistic methods. The main challenges of multi-document summarization are the identification of similar information (to ensure completeness and avoid redundancy) and the organization of the output (to assure high readability).

The picture shows the planned architecture of the MDS pipeline.

The MDS project is realized in cooparation with CyberConsult, a company experienced in the development of user friendly news portals.