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Evaluating Syntactic Sentence Compression for Text Summarisation

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Book cover Natural Language Processing and Information Systems (NLDB 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 7934))

Abstract

This paper presents our work on the evaluation of syntactic based sentence compression for automatic text summarization. Sentence compression techniques can contribute to text summarization by removing redundant and irrelevant information and allowing more space for more relevant content. However, very little work has focused on evaluating the contribution of this idea for summarization. In this paper, we focus on pruning individual sentences in extractive summaries using phrase structure grammar representations. We have implemented several syntax-based pruning techniques and evaluated them in the context of automatic summarization, using standard evaluation metrics. We have performed our evaluation on the TAC and DUC corpora using the BlogSum and MEAD summarizers. The results show that sentence pruning can achieve compression rates as low as 60%, however when using this extra space to fill in more sentences, ROUGE scores do not improve significantly.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer Science & Software Engineering, Concordia University Montreal, Canada

    Prasad Perera & Leila Kosseim

Authors
  1. Prasad Perera
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  2. Leila Kosseim
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, 2 rue Conté, 75003, Paris, France

    Elisabeth Métais

  2. School of Computing, Science and Engineering, University of Salford, The Crescent, M5 4WT, Salford, Lancashire, UK

    Farid Meziane  & Sunil Vadera  & 

  3. School of Computing Science and Engineering, University of Salford, The Crescent, M5 4WT, Salford, Lancashire, UK

    Mohamad Saraee

  4. Department of Decision and Information Sciences School of Business Administration, Oakland University, 306 Elliott Hall, 48309, Rochester, MI, USA

    Vijayan Sugumaran

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Perera, P., Kosseim, L. (2013). Evaluating Syntactic Sentence Compression for Text Summarisation. In: Métais, E., Meziane, F., Saraee, M., Sugumaran, V., Vadera, S. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Information Systems. NLDB 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7934. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38824-8_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38824-8_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-38823-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-38824-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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