Semantic-Based Opinion Summarization

The amount of information available online can be overwhelming for users to digest, specially when dealing with other users’ comments when making a decision about buying a product or service. In this context, opinion summarization systems are of great value, extracting important information from the texts and presenting them to the user in a more understandable manner. It is also known that the usage of semantic representations can benefit the quality of the generated summaries. This paper aims at developing opinion summarization methods based on Abstract Meaning Representation of texts in the Brazilian Portuguese language. Four different methods have been investigated, alongside some literature approaches. The results show that a Machine Learning-based method produced summaries of higher quality, outperforming other literature techniques on manually constructed semantic graphs. We also show that using parsed graphs over manually annotated ones harmed the output. Finally, an analysis of how important different types of information are for the summarization process suggests that using Sentiment Analysis features did not improve summary quality.