The automation of text summarisation of biomedical publications is a pressing need due to the plethora of information available on-line. This paper explores the impact of several supervised machine learning approaches for extracting multi-document summaries for given queries. In particular, we compare classification and regression approaches for query-based extractive summarisation using data provided by the BioASQ Challenge. We tackled the problem of annotating sentences for training classification systems and show that a simple annotation approach outperforms regression-based summarisation.
●● ● ● ● To summarize is to reduce in complexity, and hence in length, while retaining some of the essential qualities of the original. This paper focusses on document extracts, a particular kind of computed document summary. Document extracts consisting of roughly 20 of the original cart be as informative as the full text of a document, which suggests that even shorter extracts may be useful indicative summmies. The trends in our results are in agreement with those of Edmundson who used a subjectively weighted combination of features as opposed to training the feature weights using a corpus.