Semantic argument frequency-based Multi-Document Summarization

Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) aims to identify the constituents of a sentence, together with their roles with respect to the sentence predicates. In this paper, we introduce and assess the idea of using SRL on generic Multi-Document Summarization (MDS). We score sentences according to their inclusion of frequent semantic phrases and form the summary using the top-scored sentences. We compare this method with a term-based sentence scoring approach to investigate the effects of using semantic units instead of single words for sentence scoring. We also integrate our scoring metric as an auxiliary feature to a cutting edge summarizer with the intention of examining its effects on the performance. The experiments using datasets from the Document Understanding Conference (DUC) 2004 show that the SRL-based summarization outperforms the term-based approach as well as most of the DUC participants. © 2009 IEEE

Summarizing Dialogic Arguments from Social Media

Online argumentative dialog is a rich source of information on popular beliefs and opinions that could be useful to companies as well as governmental or public policy agencies. Compact, easy to read, summaries of these dialogues would thus be highly valuable. A priori, it is not even clear what form such a summary should take. Previous work on summarization has primarily focused on summarizing written texts, where the notion of an abstract of the text is well defined. We collect gold standard training data consisting of five human summaries for each of 161 dialogues on the topics of Gay Marriage, Gun Control and Abortion. We present several different computational models aimed at identifying segments of the dialogues whose content should be used for the summary, using linguistic features and Word2vec features with both SVMs and Bidirectional LSTMs. We show that we can identify the most important arguments by using the dialog context with a best F-measure of 0.74 for gun control, 0.71 for gay marriage, and 0.67 for abortion.Comment: Proceedings of the 21th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial 2017

Foreground and background text in retrieval

Our hypothesis is that certain clauses have foreground functions in text, while other clauses have background functions and that these functions are expressed or reflected in the syntactic structure of the clause. Presumably these clauses will have differing utility for automatic approaches to text understanding; a summarization system might want to utilize background clauses to capture commonalities between numbers of documents while an indexing system might use foreground clauses in order to capture specific characteristics of a certain document

Generating indicative-informative summaries with SumUM

We present and evaluate SumUM, a text summarization system that takes a raw technical text as input and produces an indicative informative summary. The indicative part of the summary identifies the topics of the document, and the informative part elaborates on some of these topics according to the reader's interest. SumUM motivates the topics, describes entities, and defines concepts. It is a first step for exploring the issue of dynamic summarization. This is accomplished through a process of shallow syntactic and semantic analysis, concept identification, and text regeneration. Our method was developed through the study of a corpus of abstracts written by professional abstractors. Relying on human judgment, we have evaluated indicativeness, informativeness, and text acceptability of the automatic summaries. The results thus far indicate good performance when compared with other summarization technologies

Some Reflections on the Task of Content Determination in the Context of Multi-Document Summarization of Evolving Events

Despite its importance, the task of summarizing evolving events has received small attention by researchers in the field of multi-document summariztion. In a previous paper (Afantenos et al. 2007) we have presented a methodology for the automatic summarization of documents, emitted by multiple sources, which describe the evolution of an event. At the heart of this methodology lies the identification of similarities and differences between the various documents, in two axes: the synchronic and the diachronic. This is achieved by the introduction of the notion of Synchronic and Diachronic Relations. Those relations connect the messages that are found in the documents, resulting thus in a graph which we call grid. Although the creation of the grid completes the Document Planning phase of a typical NLG architecture, it can be the case that the number of messages contained in a grid is very large, exceeding thus the required compression rate. In this paper we provide some initial thoughts on a probabilistic model which can be applied at the Content Determination stage, and which tries to alleviate this problem.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure