Content Coverage Maximization on Word Networks for Hierarchical Topic Summarization

This paper studies text summarization by extracting hierarchical topics from a given collection of documents. We propose a new approach of text modeling via network analysis. We convert documents into a word influence network, and find the words summarizing the major topics with an efficient influence maximization algorithm. Besides, the influence capability of the topic words on other words in the network reveal the relations among the topic words. Then we cluster the words and build hierarchies for the topics. Experiments on large collections of Web documents show that a simple method based on the influence analysis is effective, compared with existing generative topic modeling and random walk based ranking.