TY - JOUR T1 - Sentence compression as a component of a multi-document summarization system JF - Proceedings of the 2006 Document Understanding Workshop, New York Y1 - 2006 A1 - Zajic, David A1 - Dorr, Bonnie J A1 - Jimmy Lin A1 - Schwartz,R. AB - We applied a single-document sentence-trimming approach (Trimmer) to the problem of multi-document summariza- tion. Trimmer was designed with the in- tention of compressing a lead sentence into a space consisting of tens of char- acters. In our Multi-Document Trimmer (MDT), we use Trimmer to generate multiple trimmed candidates for each sentence. Sentence selection is used to determine which trimmed candidates provide the best combination of topic coverage and brevity. We demonstrate that we were able to port Trimmer easily to this new problem. We also show that MDT generally ranked higher for recall than for precision, suggesting that MDT is currently more successful at finding relevant content than it is at weeding out irrelevant content. Finally, we present an error analysis that shows that, while sentence compressions is making space for additional sentences, more work is needed in the area of generating and se- lecting the right candidates. ER -