From Global to Local: Learning Context-Aware Graph Representations for Document Classification and Summarization

Abstract: This paper proposes a data-driven method to automatically construct graph-based document representations. Building upon the recent work of Bugueño and de Melo (2025), we leverage the dynamic sliding-window attention module to effectively capture local and mid-range semantic dependencies between sentences, as well as structural relations within documents. Graph Attention Networks (GATs) trained on our learned graphs achieve competitive results on document classification while requiring lower computational resources than previous approaches. We further present an exploratory evaluation of the proposed graph construction method for extractive document summarization, highlighting both its potential and current limitations. The implementation of this project can be found on GitHub.