Summarising News Stories for Children

This paper proposes a system to automatically summarise news articles in a manner suitable for children by deriving and combining statistical ratings for how important, positively oriented and easy to read each sentence is. Our results demonstrate that this approach succeeds in generating summaries that are suitable for children, and that there is further scope for combining this extractive approach with abstractive methods used in text implification

Text Simplification using Typed Dependencies : A Comparision of the Robustness of Different Generation Strategies

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant Number RES-000-22- 3272).Publisher PD

SaferDrive: an NLG-based Behaviour Change Support System for Drivers

Despite the long history of Natural Language Generation (NLG) research, the potential for influencing real world behaviour through automatically generated texts has not received much attention. In this paper, we present SaferDrive, a behaviour change support system that uses NLG and telematic data in order to create weekly textual feedback for automobile drivers, which is delivered through a smartphone application. Usage-based car insurances use sensors to track driver behaviour. Although the data collected by such insurances could provide detailed feedback about the driving style, they are typically withheld from the driver and used only to calculate insurance premiums. SaferDrive instead provides detailed textual feedback about the driving style, with the intent to help drivers improve their driving habits. We evaluate the system with real drivers and report that the textual feedback generated by our system does have a positive influence on driving habits, especially with regard to speeding

Recognizing cited facts and principles in legal judgements

In common law jurisdictions, legal professionals cite facts and legal principles from precedent cases to support their arguments before the court for their intended outcome in a current case. This practice stems from the doctrine of stare decisis, where cases that have similar facts should receive similar decisions with respect to the principles. It is essential for legal professionals to identify such facts and principles in precedent cases, though this is a highly time intensive task. In this paper, we present studies that demonstrate that human annotators can achieve reasonable agreement on which sentences in legal judgements contain cited facts and principles (respectively, κ=0.65 and κ=0.95 for inter- and intra-annotator agreement). We further demonstrate that it is feasible to automatically annotate sentences containing such legal facts and principles in a supervised machine learning framework based on linguistic features, reporting per category precision and recall figures of between 0.79 and 0.89 for classifying sentences in legal judgements as cited facts, principles or neither using a Bayesian classifier, with an overall κ of 0.72 with the human-annotated gold standard

Columbia University at MSE 2005

We describe our participation in the Multilingual Summarization Evaluation 2005

Incorporating Constraints into Matrix Factorization for Clothes Package Recommendation

Recommender systems have been widely applied in the literature to suggest individual items to users. In this paper, we consider the harder problem of package recommendation, where items are recommended together as a package. We focus on the clothing domain, where a package recommendation involves a combination of a "top'' (e.g. a shirt) and a "bottom'' (e.g. a pair of trousers). The novelty in this work is that we combined matrix factorisation methods for collaborative filtering with hand-crafted and learnt fashion constraints on combining item features such as colour, formality and patterns. Finally, to better understand where the algorithms are underperforming, we conducted focus groups, which lead to deeper insights into how to use constraints to improve package recommendation in this domain

Summarising the points made in online political debates

Online communities host growing numbers of discussions amongst large groups of participants on all manner of topics. This user-generated content contains millions of statements of opinions and ideas. We propose an abstractive approach to summarize such argumentative discussions, making key content accessible through ‘point’ extraction, where a point is a verb and its syntactic arguments. Our approach uses both dependency parse information and verb case frames to identify and extract valid points, and generates an abstractive summary that discusses the key points being made in the debate. We performed a human evaluation of our approach using a corpus of online political debates and report significant improvements over a high-performing extractive summarizer

Exploring the impact of extroversion on the selection of learning materials

The Internet provides access to many learning materials that could complement class room teaching. An educational recommender system can aid learners to find learning materials most suitable to them. The best learning materials will depend on learner characteristics. This paper investigates the influence of learner personality. In particular, it describes a study in the language learning domain that explores the relation between learners’ extroversion and the extent to which learning materials are perceived to be enjoyable and to increase their confidence and skills. We found positive correlations between extroversion and these criteria for social and active learning materials

An annotation scheme for citation function

We study the interplay of the discourse structure of a scientific argument with formal citations. One subproblem of this is to classify academic citations in scientific articles according to their rhetorical function, e.g., as a rival approach, as a part of the solution, or as a flawed approach that justifies the current research. Here, we introduce our annotation scheme with 12 categories, and present an agreement study