Identifying Relationships Among Sentences in Court Case Transcripts Using Discourse Relations

Case Law has a significant impact on the proceedings of legal cases. Therefore, the information that can be obtained from previous court cases is valuable to lawyers and other legal officials when performing their duties. This paper describes a methodology of applying discourse relations between sentences when processing text documents related to the legal domain. In this study, we developed a mechanism to classify the relationships that can be observed among sentences in transcripts of United States court cases. First, we defined relationship types that can be observed between sentences in court case transcripts. Then we classified pairs of sentences according to the relationship type by combining a machine learning model and a rule-based approach. The results obtained through our system were evaluated using human judges. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study where discourse relationships between sentences have been used to determine relationships among sentences in legal court case transcripts.Comment: Conference: 2018 International Conference on Advances in ICT for Emerging Regions (ICTer

Multi Document Summarization Based On Cross-Document Relation Using Voting Technique

News articles which are available through online search often provide readers with large collection of texts. Especially in the case of news story, different news sources reporting on the same event usually returns multiple articles in response to a reader’s search. In this work, we first identify cross-document relations from un-annotated texts using Genetic-CBR approach. Following that, we develop a new sentence scoring model based on voting technique over the identified cross-document relations. Our experiments show that incorporating the proposed methods in the summarization process yields substantial improvement over the mainstream methods. The performances of all methods were evaluated using ROUGE—a standard evaluation metric used in text summarization

A discursive grid approach to model local coherence in multi-document summaries

Multi-document summarization is a very important area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) nowadays because of the huge amount of data in the web. People want more and more information and this information must be coherently organized and summarized. The main focus of this paper is to deal with the coherence of multi-document summaries. Therefore, a model that uses discursive information to automatically evaluate local coherence in multi-document summaries has been developed. This model obtains 92.69% of accuracy in distinguishing coherent from incoherent summaries, outperforming the state of the art in the area.CAPESFAPESPUniversity of Goiá

Exploring the subtopic-based relationship map strategy for multi-document summarization

In this paper we adapt and explore strategies for generating multi-document summaries based on relationship maps, which represent texts as graphs (maps) of interrelated segments and apply different traversing techniques for producing the summaries. In particular, we focus on the Segmented Bushy Path, a sophisticated method which tries to represent in a summary the main subtopics from source texts while keeping its informativeness. In addition, we also investigate some well-known subtopic segmentation and clustering techniques in order to correctly select the most relevant information to compose the final summary. We show that this subtopic-based method outperforms other methods for multi-document summarization and that achieves state of the art results, competing with the most sophisticated deep summarization methods in the area

A Review On Automatic Text Summarization Approaches

It has been more than 50 years since the initial investigation on automatic text summarization was started.Various techniques have been successfully used to extract the important contents from text document to represent document summary.In this study,we review some of the studies that have been conducted in this still-developing research area.It covers the basics of text summarization,the types of summarization,the methods that have been used and some areas in which text summarization has been applied.Furthermore,this paper also reviews the significant efforts which have been put in studies concerning sentence extraction,domain specific summarization and multi document summarization and provides the theoretical explanation and the fundamental concepts related to it.In addition,the advantages and limitations concerning the approaches commonly used for text summarization are also highlighted in this study

Caracterização da complementaridade temporal: subsídios para sumarização automática multidocumento

Complementarity is a usual multi-document phenomenon that commonly occurs among news texts about the same event. From a set of sentence pairs (in Portuguese) manually annotated with CST (Cross-Document Structure Theory) relations (Historical background and Follow-up) that make explicit the temporal complementary among the sentences, we identified a potential set of linguistic attributes of such complementary. Using Machine Learning algorithms, we evaluate the capacity of the attributes to discriminate between Historical background and Follow-up. JRip learned a small set of rules with high accuracy. Based on a set of 5 rules, the classifier discriminates the CST relations with 80% of accuracy. According to the rules, the occurrence of temporal expression in sentence 2 is the most discriminative feature in the task. As a contribution, the JRip classifier can improve the performance of the CST-discourse parsers for Portuguese.A complementaridade é um fenômeno multidocumento comumente observado entre notícias que versam sobre um mesmo evento. A partir de um corpus em português composto por um conjunto de pares de sentenças manualmente anotadas com as relações da Cross-Document Structure Theory (CST) que explicitam a complementaridade temporal (Historical background e Follow-up), identificou-se um conjunto potencial de atributos linguísticos desse tipo de complementaridade. Por meio de algoritmos de Aprendizado de Máquina, testou-se o potencial dos atributos em distinguir as referidas relações. O classificador simbólico gerado pelo algoritmo JRip obteve o melhor desempenho ao se considerar a precisão e o tamanho reduzido do conjunto de regras. Somente com base em 5 regras, tal classificador identificou Follow-up e Historical background com precisão aproximada de 80%. Ademais, as regras do classificador indicam que o atributo ocorrência de expressão temporal na sentença 2 é o mais relevante para a tarefa. Como contribuição, salienta-se que o classificador JRip aqui gerado pode ser utilizado nos analisadores discursivos multidocumento para o português do Brasil que são baseados na CST

Método fuzzy para a sumarização automática de texto com base em um modelo extrativo (FSumm)

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Computação, Florianópolis, 2015.A sumarização automática de texto procura condensar o conteúdo do documento, extraindo as informações mais relevantes. Esse processo normalmente é executado através de métodos computacionais que incorporam o método estatístico e o linguístico. O rápido desenvolvimento das tecnologias emergentes e a crescente quantidade de informação disponível inserem novos desafios para esta área de pesquisa. Um desses desafios está na identificação das sentenças mais informativas no momento da geração do sumário. Como a tarefa de sumarizar informações de texto traz consigo a incerteza inerente à linguagem natural, a lógica fuzzy pode ser aplicada nessa tarefa para contribuir nos resultados gerados. Portanto, esta dissertação propõe um método de sumarização automática de texto utilizando a lógica fuzzy para a classificação das sentenças. O método foi desenvolvido por meio da técnica de sumarização extrativa ao qual se associam tarefas de Recuperação de Informação (RI) e de Processamento de Linguagem Natural (PLN). Para a avaliação deste método, considerou-se um corpus de textos em língua portuguesa e uma ferramenta que automatiza o processo. A ferramenta de avaliação analisa a sobreposição das unidades textuais entre os sumários automáticos e o modelo humano, dadas pelas medidas de precisão, cobertura e medida-f. Foram realizados experimentos que demonstram a efetividade do método na classificação da informatividade das sentenças.Abstract : Automatic text summarization attempts to condense the document content, extracting the most relevant information. This process is usually performed by computational methods such as statistical and linguistic. The rapid development of emerging technologies and the increasing amount of information available insert new research challenges. One of these challenges is to identify the most informative sentences at the time of the summary generation. The textual information summarization task brings with it the uncertainty inherent in natural language where fuzzy logic can be applied and contribute to the results. Therefore, this dissertation proposes a method of automatic text summarization using fuzzy logic to the classification of sentences. The method was developed by extractive summarization techniques which are associated with information retrieval tasks (IR) and natural language processing (NLP). The evaluation method considers a corpus of Brazilian Portuguese news texts and a tool for evaluation of summaries. The assessment tool analyzes the text units overlaps between automatic summaries and human model producing measures (precision, recall, F-measure) that express the informativeness of the summaries. We also present experiments showing the effectiveness of our method in the informativeness sentences classification