Generating answers to complex questions in the form of multi-document summaries requires access to question decomposition methods. In this paper we present three methods for decomposing complex questions and we evaluate their impact on the responsiveness of the answers they enable.

This paper describes a novel clustering-based text summarization system that uses Multiple Sequence Alignment to improve the alignment of sentences within topic clusters. While most current clustering-based summarization systems base their summaries only on the common information contained in a collection of highly-related sentences, our system constructs more informative summaries that incorporate both the redundant and unique contributions of the sentences in the cluster. When evaluated using ROUGE, the summaries produced by our system represent a substantial improvement over the baseline, which is at 63% of the human performance.