In recent years, there has been increased interest in topic-focused multi-document
summarization. In this task, automatic summaries are produced in response to a specific
information request, or topic, stated by the user. The system we have designed to
accomplish this task comprises four main components: a generic extractive summarization
system, a topic-focusing component, sentence simplification, and lexical expansion of topic
words. This paper details each of these components, together with experiments designed to …