  Generating an abstract from a collection of documents is a desirable
capability for many real-world applications. However, abstractive approaches to
multi-document summarization have not been thoroughly investigated. This paper
studies the feasibility of using Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), a
semantic representation of natural language grounded in linguistic theory, as a
form of content representation. Our approach condenses source documents to a
set of summary graphs following the AMR formalism. The summary graphs are then
transformed to a set of summary sentences in a surface realization step. The
framework is fully data-driven and flexible. Each component can be optimized
independently using small-scale, in-domain training data. We perform
experiments on benchmark summarization datasets and report promising results.
We also describe opportunities and challenges for advancing this line of
research.
