Multi-document summarization (MDS) systems have been designed for short, un-structured summaries of 10-15 documents, and are inadequate for larger document collections. We propose a new approach to scaling up summarization called hierar-chical summarization, and present the first implemented system, SUMMA. SUMMA produces a hierarchy of relatively short summaries, in which the top level provides a general overview and users can navigate the hierarchy to drill down for more details on topics of interest. SUMMA optimizes for coherence as well as cover-age of salient information. In an Amazon Mechanical Turk evaluation, users pref-ered SUMMA ten times as often as flat MDS and three times as often as timelines. 1
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Christensen et al. (2014) studied this question.