A framework for the Comparative analysis of text summarization techniques

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced Analytics, specialization in Data ScienceWe see that with the boom of information technology and IOT (Internet of things), the size of information which is basically data is increasing at an alarming rate. This information can always be harnessed and if channeled into the right direction, we can always find meaningful information. But the problem is this data is not always numerical and there would be problems where the data would be completely textual, and some meaning has to be derived from it. If one would have to go through these texts manually, it would take hours or even days to get a concise and meaningful information out of the text. This is where a need for an automatic summarizer arises easing manual intervention, reducing time and cost but at the same time retaining the key information held by these texts. In the recent years, new methods and approaches have been developed which would help us to do so. These approaches are implemented in lot of domains, for example, Search engines provide snippets as document previews, while news websites produce shortened descriptions of news subjects, usually as headlines, to make surfing easier. Broadly speaking, there are mainly two ways of text summarization – extractive and abstractive summarization. Extractive summarization is the approach in which important sections of the whole text are filtered out to form the condensed form of the text. While the abstractive summarization is the approach in which the text as a whole is interpreted and examined and after discerning the meaning of the text, sentences are generated by the model itself describing the important points in a concise way

Text pre-processing tool to increase the exactness of experimental results in summarization solutions

For years, and nowadays even more because of the ease of access to information, countless scientific documents that cover all branches of human knowledge are generated. These documents, consisting mostly of text, are stored in digital libraries that are increasingly consenting access and manipulation. This has allowed these repositories of documents to be used for research work of great interest, particularly those related to evaluation of automatic summaries through experimentation. In this area of computer science, the experimental results of many of the published works are obtained using document collections, some known and others not so much, but without specifying all the special considerations to achieve said results. This produces an unfair competition in the realization of experiments when comparing results and does not allow to be objective in the obtained conclusions. This paper presents a text document manipulation tool to increase the exactness of results when obtaining, evaluating and comparing automatic summaries from different corpora. This work has been motivated by the need to have a tool that allows to process documents, split their content properly and make sure that each text snippet does not lose its contextual information. Applying the model proposed to a set of free-access scientific papers has been successful.XV Workshop Bases de Datos y Minería de Datos (WBDDM)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Text pre-processing tool to increase the exactness of experimental results in summarization solutions

For years, and nowadays even more because of the ease of access to information, countless scientific documents that cover all branches of human knowledge are generated. These documents, consisting mostly of text, are stored in digital libraries that are increasingly consenting access and manipulation. This has allowed these repositories of documents to be used for research work of great interest, particularly those related to evaluation of automatic summaries through experimentation. In this area of computer science, the experimental results of many of the published works are obtained using document collections, some known and others not so much, but without specifying all the special considerations to achieve said results. This produces an unfair competition in the realization of experiments when comparing results and does not allow to be objective in the obtained conclusions. This paper presents a text document manipulation tool to increase the exactness of results when obtaining, evaluating and comparing automatic summaries from different corpora. This work has been motivated by the need to have a tool that allows to process documents, split their content properly and make sure that each text snippet does not lose its contextual information. Applying the model proposed to a set of free-access scientific papers has been successful.XV Workshop Bases de Datos y Minería de Datos (WBDDM)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Sentence Fusion for Multidocument News Summarization

The problem of organizing information for multidocument summarization so that the generated summary is coherent has received relatively little attention. While sentence ordering for single document summarization can be determined from the ordering of sentences in the input article, this is not the case for multidocument summarization where summary sentences may be drawn from different input articles. In this paper, we propose a methodology for studying the properties of ordering information in the news genre and describe experiments done on a corpus of multiple acceptable orderings we developed for the task. Based on these experiments, we implemented a strategy for ordering information that combines constraints from chronological order of events and topical relatedness. Evaluation of our augmented algorithm shows a significant improvement of the ordering over two baseline strategies

Towards Personalized and Human-in-the-Loop Document Summarization

The ubiquitous availability of computing devices and the widespread use of the internet have generated a large amount of data continuously. Therefore, the amount of available information on any given topic is far beyond humans' processing capacity to properly process, causing what is known as information overload. To efficiently cope with large amounts of information and generate content with significant value to users, we require identifying, merging and summarising information. Data summaries can help gather related information and collect it into a shorter format that enables answering complicated questions, gaining new insight and discovering conceptual boundaries. This thesis focuses on three main challenges to alleviate information overload using novel summarisation techniques. It further intends to facilitate the analysis of documents to support personalised information extraction. This thesis separates the research issues into four areas, covering (i) feature engineering in document summarisation, (ii) traditional static and inflexible summaries, (iii) traditional generic summarisation approaches, and (iv) the need for reference summaries. We propose novel approaches to tackle these challenges, by: i)enabling automatic intelligent feature engineering, ii) enabling flexible and interactive summarisation, iii) utilising intelligent and personalised summarisation approaches. The experimental results prove the efficiency of the proposed approaches compared to other state-of-the-art models. We further propose solutions to the information overload problem in different domains through summarisation, covering network traffic data, health data and business process data.Comment: PhD thesi

Information fusion for automated question answering

Until recently, research efforts in automated Question Answering (QA) have mainly focused on getting a good understanding of questions to retrieve correct answers. This includes deep parsing, lookups in ontologies, question typing and machine learning of answer patterns appropriate to question forms. In contrast, I have focused on the analysis of the relationships between answer candidates as provided in open domain QA on multiple documents. I argue that such candidates have intrinsic properties, partly regardless of the question, and those properties can be exploited to provide better quality and more user-oriented answers in QA.Information fusion refers to the technique of merging pieces of information from different sources. In QA over free text, it is motivated by the frequency with which different answer candidates are found in different locations, leading to a multiplicity of answers. The reason for such multiplicity is, in part, the massive amount of data used for answering, and also its unstructured and heterogeneous content: Besides am¬ biguities in user questions leading to heterogeneity in extractions, systems have to deal with redundancy, granularity and possible contradictory information. Hence the need for answer candidate comparison. While frequency has proved to be a significant char¬ acteristic of a correct answer, I evaluate the value of other relationships characterizing answer variability and redundancy.Partially inspired by recent developments in multi-document summarization, I re¬ define the concept of "answer" within an engineering approach to QA based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern of user interface design. An "answer model" is a directed graph in which nodes correspond to entities projected from extractions and edges convey relationships between such nodes. The graph represents the fusion of information contained in the set of extractions. Different views of the answer model can be produced, capturing the fact that the same answer can be expressed and pre¬ sented in various ways: picture, video, sound, written or spoken language, or a formal data structure. Within this framework, an answer is a structured object contained in the model and retrieved by a strategy to build a particular view depending on the end user (or taskj's requirements.I describe shallow techniques to compare entities and enrich the model by discovering four broad categories of relationships between entities in the model: equivalence, inclusion, aggregation and alternative. Quantitatively, answer candidate modeling im¬ proves answer extraction accuracy. It also proves to be more robust to incorrect answer candidates than traditional techniques. Qualitatively, models provide meta-information encoded by relationships that allow shallow reasoning to help organize and generate the final output