Fast changing knowledge on the Internet can be acquired more efficiently with the help of automatic document summarization and updating techniques. This paper describes a novel approach for multi-document update summarization. The best summary is defined to be the one which has the minimum information distance to the entire document set. The best update summary has the minimum conditional information distance to a document cluster given that a prior document cluster has already been read. Experiments on the DUC/TAC 2007 to 2009 datasets (http://duc.nist.gov/, http://www.nist.gov/tac/) have proved that our method closely correlates with the human summaries and outperforms other programs such as LexRank in many categories under the ROUGE evaluation criterion.

Multiword Expressions (MWEs) appear frequently and ungrammatically in natural languages. Identifying MWEs in free texts is a very challenging problem. This paper proposes a knowledge-free, unsupervised, and languageindependent Multiword Expression Distance (MED). The new metric is derived from an accepted physical principle, measures the distance from an n-gram to its semantics, and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on MWEs in two applications: question answering and named entity extraction.

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