A Comparative Study of Deep Learning Approaches for Query-Focused Extractive Multi-Document Summarization

Query-focused multi-document summarization aims to produce a single, short document that summarizes a set of documents that are relevant to a given query. During the past few years, deep learning approaches have been utilized to generate summaries in an abstractive or extractive manner. In this study, we employ six deep neural network approaches to solving a query-focused extractive multi-document summarization task and compare their performances. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to compare deep learning techniques on extractive query-focused multi-document summarization. Our experiments with DUC 2005–2007 benchmark datasets show that Bi-LSTM with Max-pooling achieves the highest performance among the methods compared.