An unsupervised method for extractive multi-document summarization based on centroid approach and sentence embeddings

Extractive multi-document summarization (MDS) is the process of automatically summarizing a collection of documents by ranking sentences according to their importance and informativeness. Text representation is a fundamental process that affects the effectiveness of many text summarization methods. Word embedding representations have shown to be effective for several Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks including Automatic Text Summarization (ATS). However, most of these representations do not consider the order and the semantic relationships between words in a sentence. This does not fully allow grasping the sentence semantics and the syntactic relationships between sentences constituents. In this paper, to overcome this problem, we propose an unsupervised method for generic extractive multi-document summarization based on the sentence embedding representations and the centroid approach. The proposed method selects relevant sentences according to the final score obtained by combining three scores: sentence content relevance, sentence novelty, and sentence position scores. The sentence content relevance score is computed as the cosine similarity between the centroid embedding vector of the cluster of documents and the sentence embedding vectors. The sentence novelty metric is explicitly adopted to deal with redundancy. The sentence position metric assumes that the first sentences of a document are more relevant to the summary, and it assigns high scores to these sentences. Moreover, this paper provides a comparative analysis of nine sentence embedding models used to represent sentences as dense vectors in a low dimensional vector space in the context of extractive multi-document summarization. Experiments are performed on the standard DUC’2002–2004 benchmark datasets and the Multi-News dataset. The overall obtained results have shown that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art methods and achieves promising results compared to the best performing methods including supervised deep learning based methods. •An unsupervised method for extractive multi-document summarization.•Pre-trained sentence embedding models are used for sentences representations.•Centroid approach is applied to compute the sentence content relevance score.•Sentence selection based on sentence relevance, novelty and position scores.•The use of sentence embedding methods leads to significant improvements.