This paper introduces a new type of summarization task, known as microblog summarization, which aims to synthesize content from multiple microblog posts on the same topic into a human-readable prose description of fixed length. Our approach leverages (1) a generative model which induces event structures from text and (2) a user behavior model which captures how users convey relevant content.

We present a sequence of unsupervised, nonparametric Bayesian models for clustering complex linguistic objects. In this approach, we consider a potentially infinite number of features and categorical outcomes. We evaluate these models for the task of within- and cross-document event coreference on two corpora. All the models we investigated show significant improvements when compared against an existing baseline for this task.