Query Based Summary for Assessing Document Relevance

An investigation into the usefulness of the query based document summarization in the context of information retrieval has been made. The summarization method reported in this paper attempts to use relationship between query terms to produce an extractive summary and a graphical overview, in the form of a conceptual graph, of the document content with respect to a standing query. The graphical summary will be quite useful for short queries, e.g. queries comprising of person names only, which is quite common in a newswire domain. The conceptual graph produced by the system reflects how query terms appearing in a retrieved document are related with other terms. The evaluation scheme focuses on measuring the effectiveness of the summary in making user's relevance decision. Subject-based evaluation is proposed for the system. The initial investigation suggests that our approach is more indicative of source's content than the lead-based approach.