  Automated multi-document extractive text summarization is a widely studied
research problem in the field of natural language understanding. Such
extractive mechanisms compute in some form the worthiness of a sentence to be
included into the summary. While the conventional approaches rely on human
crafted document-independent features to generate a summary, we develop a
data-driven novel summary system called HNet, which exploits the various
semantic and compositional aspects latent in a sentence to capture document
independent features. The network learns sentence representation in a way that,
salient sentences are closer in the vector space than non-salient sentences.
This semantic and compositional feature vector is then concatenated with the
document-dependent features for sentence ranking. Experiments on the DUC
benchmark datasets (DUC-2001, DUC-2002 and DUC-2004) indicate that our model
shows significant performance gain of around 1.5-2 points in terms of ROUGE
score compared with the state-of-the-art baselines.
