A General Optimization Framework for Multi-Document Summarization Using Genetic Algorithms and Swarm Intelligence

Extracting summaries via integer linear programming and submodularity are popular and successful techniques in extractive multi-document summarization. However, many interesting optimization objectives are neither submodular nor factorizable into an integer linear program. We address this issue and present a general optimization framework where any function of input documents and a system summary can be plugged in. Our framework includes two kinds of summarizers {--} one based on genetic algorithms, the other using a swarm intelligence approach. In our experimental evaluation, we investigate the optimization of two information-theoretic summary evaluation metrics and find that our framework yields competitive results compared to several strong summarization baselines. Our comparative analysis of the genetic and swarm summarizers reveals interesting complementary properties.