9,898 research outputs found
Text segmentation on multilabel documents: A distant-supervised approach
Segmenting text into semantically coherent segments is an important task with
applications in information retrieval and text summarization. Developing
accurate topical segmentation requires the availability of training data with
ground truth information at the segment level. However, generating such labeled
datasets, especially for applications in which the meaning of the labels is
user-defined, is expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we develop an
approach that instead of using segment-level ground truth information, it
instead uses the set of labels that are associated with a document and are
easier to obtain as the training data essentially corresponds to a multilabel
dataset. Our method, which can be thought of as an instance of distant
supervision, improves upon the previous approaches by exploiting the fact that
consecutive sentences in a document tend to talk about the same topic, and
hence, probably belong to the same class. Experiments on the text segmentation
task on a variety of datasets show that the segmentation produced by our method
beats the competing approaches on four out of five datasets and performs at par
on the fifth dataset. On the multilabel text classification task, our method
performs at par with the competing approaches, while requiring significantly
less time to estimate than the competing approaches.Comment: Accepted in 2018 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM
Explicit diversification of event aspects for temporal summarization
During major events, such as emergencies and disasters, a large volume of information is reported on newswire and social media platforms. Temporal summarization (TS) approaches are used to automatically produce concise overviews of such events by extracting text snippets from related articles over time. Current TS approaches rely on a combination of event relevance and textual novelty for snippet selection. However, for events that span multiple days, textual novelty is often a poor criterion for selecting snippets, since many snippets are textually unique but are semantically redundant or non-informative. In this article, we propose a framework for the diversification of snippets using explicit event aspects, building on recent works in search result diversification. In particular, we first propose two techniques to identify explicit aspects that a user might want to see covered in a summary for different types of event. We then extend a state-of-the-art explicit diversification framework to maximize the coverage of these aspects when selecting summary snippets for unseen events. Through experimentation over the TREC TS 2013, 2014, and 2015 datasets, we show that explicit diversification for temporal summarization significantly outperforms classical novelty-based diversification, as the use of explicit event aspects reduces the amount of redundant and off-topic snippets returned, while also increasing summary timeliness
Concise comparative summaries (CCS) of large text corpora with a human experiment
In this paper we propose a general framework for topic-specific summarization of large text corpora and illustrate how it can be used for the analysis of news databases. Our framework, concise comparative summarization (CCS), is built on sparse classification methods. CCS is a lightweight and flexible tool that offers a compromise between simple word frequency based methods currently in wide use and more heavyweight, model-intensive methods such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). We argue that sparse methods have much to offer for text analysis and hope CCS opens the door for a new branch of research in this important field.
For a particular topic of interest (e.g., China or energy), CSS automatically labels documents as being either on- or off-topic (usually via keyword search), and then uses sparse classification methods to predict these labels with the high-dimensional counts of all the other words and phrases in the documents. The resulting small set of phrases found as predictive are then harvested as the summary.
To validate our tool, we, using news articles from the New York Times international section, designed and conducted a human survey to compare the different summarizers with human understanding. We demonstrate our approach with two case studies, a media analysis of the framing of “Egypt” in the New York Times throughout the Arab Spring and an informal comparison of the New York Times’ and Wall Street Journal’s coverage of “energy.” Overall, we find that the Lasso with L2 normalization can be effectively and usefully used to summarize large corpora, regardless of document size.Statistic
Bringing Structure into Summaries: Crowdsourcing a Benchmark Corpus of Concept Maps
Concept maps can be used to concisely represent important information and
bring structure into large document collections. Therefore, we study a variant
of multi-document summarization that produces summaries in the form of concept
maps. However, suitable evaluation datasets for this task are currently
missing. To close this gap, we present a newly created corpus of concept maps
that summarize heterogeneous collections of web documents on educational
topics. It was created using a novel crowdsourcing approach that allows us to
efficiently determine important elements in large document collections. We
release the corpus along with a baseline system and proposed evaluation
protocol to enable further research on this variant of summarization.Comment: Published at EMNLP 201
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
Generating Abstractive Summaries from Meeting Transcripts
Summaries of meetings are very important as they convey the essential content
of discussions in a concise form. Generally, it is time consuming to read and
understand the whole documents. Therefore, summaries play an important role as
the readers are interested in only the important context of discussions. In
this work, we address the task of meeting document summarization. Automatic
summarization systems on meeting conversations developed so far have been
primarily extractive, resulting in unacceptable summaries that are hard to
read. The extracted utterances contain disfluencies that affect the quality of
the extractive summaries. To make summaries much more readable, we propose an
approach to generating abstractive summaries by fusing important content from
several utterances. We first separate meeting transcripts into various topic
segments, and then identify the important utterances in each segment using a
supervised learning approach. The important utterances are then combined
together to generate a one-sentence summary. In the text generation step, the
dependency parses of the utterances in each segment are combined together to
create a directed graph. The most informative and well-formed sub-graph
obtained by integer linear programming (ILP) is selected to generate a
one-sentence summary for each topic segment. The ILP formulation reduces
disfluencies by leveraging grammatical relations that are more prominent in
non-conversational style of text, and therefore generates summaries that is
comparable to human-written abstractive summaries. Experimental results show
that our method can generate more informative summaries than the baselines. In
addition, readability assessments by human judges as well as log-likelihood
estimates obtained from the dependency parser show that our generated summaries
are significantly readable and well-formed.Comment: 10 pages, Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Symposium on Document
Engineering, DocEng' 201
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