Evaluation of Cross Domain Text Summarization

Extractive-abstractive hybrid summarization can generate readable, concise summaries for long documents. Extraction-then-abstraction and extraction-with-abstraction are two representative approaches to hybrid summarization. But their general performance is yet to be evaluated by large scale experiments.We examined two state-of-the-art hybrid summarization algorithms from three novel perspectives: we applied them to a form of headline generation not previously tried, we evaluated the generalization of the algorithms by testing them both within and across news domains; and we compared the automatic assessment of the algorithms to human comparative judgments. It is found that an extraction-then-abstraction hybrid approach outperforms an extraction-with-abstraction approach, particularly for cross-domain headline generation.