Weighted archetypal analysis of the multi-element graph for query-focused multi-document summarization

• We formalize the problem of Q-MDS as the weighted archetypal analysis problem.
• The method incorporates the query information into the archetypal analysis.
• We examine the method on several input matrix modeling configurations.
• The best results are achieved using the multi-element graph model.
• Experimental results show that the method is an effective summarization method.

Most existing research on applying the matrix factorization approaches to query-focused multi-document summarization (Q-MDS) explores either soft/hard clustering or low rank approximation methods. We employ a different kind of matrix factorization method, namely weighted archetypal analysis (wAA) to Q-MDS. In query-focused summarization, given a graph representation of a set of sentences weighted by similarity to the given query, positively and/or negatively salient sentences are values on the weighted data set boundary. We choose to use wAA to compute these extreme values, archetypes, and hence to estimate the importance of sentences in target documents set. We investigate the impact of using the multi-element graph model for query focused summarization via wAA. We conducted experiments on the data of document understanding conference (DUC) 2005 and 2006. Experimental results evidence the improvement of the proposed approach over other closely related methods and many of state-of-the-art systems.