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<Paper uid="W04-3256">
  <Title>Multi-document Biography Summarization</Title>
  <Section position="9" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
7 Conclusion and Future Work
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper, we described a system that uses IR and text categorization techniques to provide summary-length answers to biographical questions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The core problem lies in extracting biography-related information from large volumes of news texts and composing them into fluent, concise, multi-document summaries. The summaries generated by the system address the question about the person, though not listing the chronological events occurring in this person's life due to the lack of background information in the news articles themselves. In order to obtain a &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; biography, one should consult other means of information repositories.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Question: Who is Sir John Gielgud? Answer: Sir John Gielgud, one of the great actors of the English stage who enthralled audiences for more than 70 years with his eloquent voice and consummate artistry, died Sunday at his home Gielgud's last major film role was as a surreal Prospero in Peter Greenaway's controversial Shakespearean rhapsody.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Above summary does not directly explain who the person-in-question is, but indirectly does so in explanatory sentences. We plan to investigate combining fixed-form and free-form structures in answer construction. The summary would include an introductory sentence of the form &amp;quot;x is &lt;type/fame-category&gt; ...&amp;quot;, possibly through querying outside online resources. A main body would follow the introduction with an assembly of checklist items generated from the 10-Class classifier. A conclusion would contain open-ended items of special interest.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Furthermore, we would like to investigate compression strategies in creating summaries, specifically for biographies. Our biography corpus was tailored for this purpose and will be the starting point for further investigation.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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