1. A processor-implemented method for generating a multi-document summary, the method comprising: receiving, by a processor, a query statement, one or more documents, one or more summary constraints, and one or more goals; identifying one or more keywords within the query statement; performing a sentence selection from the one or more documents based on the one or more identified keywords; generating a plurality of candidate summaries of the one or more documents based on the performed sentence selection, the one or more goals, and a fully-polynomial randomized approximation scheme (FPRAS) cross entropy method; calculating a quality score for each of the plurality of generated candidate summaries using a plurality of quality features; and selecting a candidate summary from the plurality of generated candidate summaries with the highest calculated quality score that also satisfies a quality score threshold.