QCS: A system for querying, clustering and summarizing documents

Information retrieval systems consist of many complicated components. Research and development of such systems is often hampered by the difficulty in evaluating how each particular component would behave across multiple systems. We present a novel integrated information retrieval system—the Query, Cluster, Summarize (QCS) system—which is portable, modular, and permits experimentation with different instantiations of each of the constituent text analysis components. Most importantly, the combination of the three types of methods in the QCS design improves retrievals by providing users more focused information organized by topic. We demonstrate the improved performance by a series of experiments using standard test sets from the Document Understanding Conferences (DUC) as measured by the best known automatic metric for summarization system evaluation, ROUGE. Although the DUC data and evaluations were originally designed to test multidocument summarization, we developed a framework ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: IPM
• Authors: Daniel M. Dunlavy, Dianne P. O'Leary, John M. Conroy, Judith D. Schlesinger
• Keywords: Information Retrieval, Information Retrieval Systems, IPM 2007, Retrieval System—the Query