A new evaluation measure using compression dissimilarity on text summarization

Evaluation of automatic text summarization is a challenging task due to the difficulty of calculating similarity of two texts. In this paper, we define a new dissimilarity measure – compression dissimilarity to compute the dissimilarity between documents. Then we propose a new automatic evaluating method based on compression dissimilarity. The proposed method is a completely “black box” and does not need preprocessing steps. Experiments show that compression dissimilarity could clearly distinct automatic summaries from human summaries. Compression dissimilarity evaluating measure could evaluate an automatic summary by comparing with high-quality human summaries, or comparing with its original document. The evaluating results are highly correlated with human assessments, and the correlation between compression dissimilarity of summaries and compression dissimilarity of documents can serve as a meaningful measure to evaluate the consistency of an automatic text summarization system.