Topic representation mismatch is a key problem in topic-oriented summarization for the specified topic is usually too short to understand/interpret. This paper proposes a novel adaptive model for summarization, AdaSum, under the assumption that the summary and the topic representation can be mutually boosted. AdaSum aims to simultaneously optimize the topic representation and extract effective summaries. This model employs a mutual boosting process to minimize the topic representation mismatch for base summarizers. Furthermore, a linear combination of base summarizers is proposed to further reduce the topic representation mismatch from the diversity of base summarizers with a general learning framework. We prove that the training process of AdaSum can enhance the performance measure used. Experimental results on DUC 2007 dataset show that AdaSum significantly outperforms the baseline methods for summarization (e.g. MRP, LexRank, and GSPS). Categories and Subject Descriptors