We investigate one technique to produce a summary of an original text without requiring its full semantic interpretation, but instead relying on a model of the topic progression in the text derived from lexical chains We present a new algorithm to compute lexical chains in a text, merging several robust knowledge sources: the WordNet thesaurus, a part-of-speech tagger, shallow parser for the identification of nominal groups, and a segmentation algorithm Summarization proceeds in four steps: the original text is segmented, lexical chains are constructed, strong chains are identified and significant sentences are extracted We present in this paper empirical results on the identification of strong chains and of significant sentences Preliminary results indicate that quality indicative summaries are produced Pending problems are identified Plans to address these short-comings are briefly presented

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Using lexical chains for text summarization

We present a syntax-based statistical translation model. Our model transforms a source-language parse tree into a target-language string by applying stochastic operations at each node. These operations capture linguistic differences such as word order and case marking. Model parameters are estimated in polynomial time using an EM algorithm. The model produces word alignments that are better than those produced by IBM Model 5.

https://faculty.washington.edu/fxia/courses/LING580MT/yamada_2001.pdf

A Syntax-based Statistical Translation Model

It has now been 50 years since the publication of Luhn’s seminal paper on automatic summarization. During these years the practical need for automatic summarization has become increasingly urgent and numerous papers have been published on the topic. As a result, it has become harder to find a single reference that gives an overview of past efforts or a complete view of summarization tasks and necessary system components. This article attempts to fill this void by providing a comprehensive overview of research in summarization, including the more traditional efforts in sentence extraction as well as the most novel recent approaches for determining important content, for domain and genre specific summarization and for evaluation of summarization. We also discuss the challenges that remain open, in particular the need for language generation and deeper semantic understanding of language that would be necessary for future advances in the field. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, our students and Noemie Elhadad, Hongyan Jing, Julia Hirschberg, Annie Louis, Smaranda Muresan and Dragomir Radev for their helpful feedback. This paper was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under IIS-05-34871 and CAREER 09-53445. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. Full text available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/1500000015

Automatic Summarization

generation based on rhetorical structure extraction. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Kyoto, Japan, pages 344–348. Otterbacher, Jahna, Dragomir R. Radev, and Airong Luo. 2002. Revisions that improve cohesion in multi-document summaries: A preliminary study. In ACL Workshop on Text Summarization, Philadelphia. Papineni, K., S. Roukos, T. Ward, and W-J. Zhu. 2001. BLEU: A method for automatic evaluation of machine translation. Research Report RC22176, IBM. Radev, Dragomir, Simone Teufel, Horacio Saggion, Wai Lam, John Blitzer, Arda Celebi, Hong Qi, Elliott Drabek, and Danyu Liu. 2002. Evaluation of text summarization in a cross-lingual information retrieval framework. Technical Report, Center for Language and Speech Processing, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, June. Radev, Dragomir R., Hongyan Jing, and Malgorzata Budzikowska. 2000. Centroid-based summarization of multiple documents: Sentence extraction, utility-based evaluation, and user studies. In ANLP/NAACL Workshop on Summarization, Seattle, April. Radev, Dragomir R. and Kathleen R. McKeown. 1998. Generating natural language summaries from multiple on-line sources. Computational Linguistics, 24(3):469–500. Rau, Lisa and Paul Jacobs. 1991. Creating segmented databases from free text for text retrieval. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual International ACM-SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, New York, pages 337–346. Saggion, Horacio and Guy Lapalme. 2002. Generating indicative-informative summaries with SumUM. Computational Linguistics, 28(4), 497–526. Salton, G., A. Singhal, M. Mitra, and C. Buckley. 1997. Automatic text structuring and summarization. Information Processing & Management, 33(2):193–207. Silber, H. Gregory and Kathleen McCoy. 2002. Efficiently computed lexical chains as an intermediate representation for automatic text summarization. Computational Linguistics, 28(4), 487–496. Sparck Jones, Karen. 1999. Automatic summarizing: Factors and directions. In I. Mani and M. T. Maybury, editors, Advances in Automatic Text Summarization. MIT Press, Cambridge, pages 1–13. Strzalkowski, Tomek, Gees Stein, J. Wang, and Bowden Wise. 1999. A robust practical text summarizer. In I. Mani and M. T. Maybury, editors, Advances in Automatic Text Summarization. MIT Press, Cambridge, pages 137–154. Teufel, Simone and Marc Moens. 2002. Summarizing scientific articles: Experiments with relevance and rhetorical status. Computational Linguistics, 28(4), 409–445. White, Michael and Claire Cardie. 2002. Selecting sentences for multidocument summaries using randomized local search. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Automatic Summarization (including DUC 2002), Philadelphia, July. Association for Computational Linguistics, New Brunswick, NJ, pages 9–18. Witbrock, Michael and Vibhu Mittal. 1999. Ultra-summarization: A statistical approach to generating highly condensed non-extractive summaries. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Berkeley, pages 315–316. Zechner, Klaus. 2002. Automatic summarization of open-domain multiparty dialogues in diverse genres. Computational Linguistics, 28(4), 447–485.

Introduction to the special issue on summarization

A search and recommendation system employs the preferences and profiles of individual users and groups within a community of users, as well as information derived from categorically organized content pointers, to augment Internet searches, re-rank search results, and provide recommendations for objects based on an initial subject-matter query. The search and recommendation system operates in the context of a content pointer manager, which stores individual users' content pointers (some of which may be published or shared for group use) on a centralized content pointer database connected to the Internet. The shared content pointer manager is implemented as a distributed program, portions of which operate on users' terminals and other portions of which operate on the centralized content pointer database. A user's content pointers are organized in accordance with a local topical categorical hierarchy. The hierarchical organization is used to define a relevance context within which returned objects are evaluated and ordered.

System and method for searching and recommending objects from a categorically organized information repository

We have developed an automatic abstract generation system for Japanese expository writings based on rhetorical structure extraction. The system first extracts the rhetorical structure, the compound of the rhetorical relations between sentences, and then cuts out less important parts in the extracted structure to generate an abstract of the desired length. 
Evaluation of the generated abstract showed that it contains at maximum 74\% of the most important sentences of the original text. The system is now utilized as a text browser for a prototypical interactive document retrieval system.

Abstract Generation based on Rhetorical Structure Extraction

A Discourse Structure Analyzer for Japanese Text.

A translation apparatus translates article information in a first language including an article body and a related headline as a summary of the article body. A decision unit discriminately identifies the article body and the headline in the article information. A translation unit respectively translates the article body and the headline into a second language based on identification result of the decision unit.

Translation apparatus and method

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To efficiently filter articles in plural languages distributed from news sources and to provide them to a user. SOLUTION: This information filtering device has a reception part 1 for receiving the distribution of text articles from plural news sources, similarity degree calculating part 14 for calculating the degree of similarity between retrieval conditions designated by the user and the text articles, and transmissive article discriminating part 16 for sorting the text articles in the order from the highest degree of similarity and transmitting the fixed number of text articles or only the articles having the degree of similarity higher than a previously decided threshold value to the user. The similarity degree calculating part 14 not only uses the retrieval conditions designated in a certain single language as they are but also translates the retrieval conditions into the other language and calculates the degree of similarity between those translated retrieval conditions and the text articles as well. Therefore, filtering processing can be efficiently executed to various kinds of articles written in different languages.

Information filtering device

An information filtering apparatus for providing articles to a user includes an article extraction section that retrieves articles from articles stored in an article storage section using a user-profile. An excerpt generating section generates excerpts of the retrieved article by calculating similarities between the retrieved articles and the user-profile to generate the excerpt including the user's necessary information. An abstract generating section combines excerpts to form an abstract. The user-profile for each user in the user-profile storage section is modified in accordance with user feedback.

Ono Kenji

Papers

Abstract Generation based on Rhetorical Structure Extraction

A Discourse Structure Analyzer for Japanese Text.

Translation apparatus and method

Information filtering device

Information filtering apparatus and method for retrieving a selected article from information sources