Using Rhetorical Topics for Automatic Summarization

Summarization involves finding the most important information in a text in order to convey the meaning of the document. In this paper, I present a method for using topic information to influence which content is selected for a summary. Texts are divided into topics using rhetorical information that creates a partition of a text into a sequence of non-overlapping topics. To investigate the effect of this topic structure, I compare the output of summarizing an entire text without topics to summarizing individual topics and combining them into a complete summary. The results show that the use of these rhetorical topics improves summarization performance compared to a summarization system that incorporates no topic information, demonstrating the utility of topic structure and rhetorical information for automatic summarization

Joint semantic discourse models for automatic multi-document summarization

Automatic multi-document summarization aims at selecting the essential content of related documents and presenting it in a summary. In this paper, we propose some methods for automatic summarization based on Rhetorical Structure Theory and Cross-document Structure Theory. They are chosen in order to properly address the relevance of information, multidocument phenomena and subtopical distribution in the source texts. The results show that using semantic discourse knowledge in strategies for content selection produces summaries that are more informative.Sumarização automática multidocumento visa à seleção das informações mais importantes de um conjunto de documentos para produzir um sumário. Neste artigo, propõem-se métodos para sumarização automática baseando-se em conhecimento semântico-discursivo das teorias Rhetorical Structure Theory e Cross-document Structure Theory. Tais teorias foram escolhidas para tratar adequadamente a relevância das informações, os fenômenos multidocumento e a distribuição de subtópicos dos documentos. Os resultados mostram que o uso de conhecimento semântico-discursivo para selecionar conteúdo produz sumários mais informativos.FAPESPCAPE

Resumen multidocumento utilizando teorías semántico-discursivas

El resumen automático tiene por objetivo reducir el tamaño de los textos, preservando el contenido más importante. En este trabajo, proponemos algunos métodos de resumen basados en dos teorías semántico-discursivas: Teoría de la Estructura Retórica (Rhetorical Structure Theory, RST) y Teoría de la Estructura Inter-Documento (Cross-document Structure Theory, CST). Han sido elegidas ambas teorías con el fin de abordar de un modo más relevante de un texto, los fenómenos relacionales de inter-documentos y la distribución de subtopicos en los textos. Los resultados muestran que el uso de informaciones semánticas y discursivas para la selección de contenidos mejora la capacidad informativa de los resúmenes automáticos.Automatic multi-document summarization aims at reducing the size of texts while preserving the important content. In this paper, we propose some methods for automatic summarization based on two semantic discourse models: Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and Cross-document Structure Theory (CST). These models are chosen in order to properly address the relevance of information, multi-document phenomena and subtopical distribution in the source texts. The results show that using semantic discourse knowledge for content selection improve the informativeness of automatic summaries

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