Summarizing Answers for Complicated Questions

This paper describes the multi-document summarization system designed by the Webclopedia team from ISI for DUC 2005. In contrast to the past DUCs and previous designs, this version of our summarizer consists of a query-interpretation component that directly analyzes the given user profile and topic narrative for each document cluster before creating a corresponding summary. This system ranks 4th on ROUGE-1, 7th on ROUGE-2 and ROUGESU4. Evaluations conducted by Basis Elements show this system ranks 6th among 32 automatic systems.