We report on a language resource consisting of 2000 annotated bibliography entries, which is being analyzed as part of our research on indicative document summarization. We show how annotated bibliographies cover certain aspects of summarization that have not been well-covered by other summary corpora, and motivate why they constitute an important form to study for information retrieval. We detail our methodology for collecting the corpus, and overview our document feature markup that we introduced to facilitate summary analysis. We present the characteristics of the corpus, methods of collection, and show its use in finding the distribution of types of information included in indicative summaries and their relative ordering within the summaries.
The task of creating indicative summaries that help a searcher decide whether to read a particular document is a difficult task. This paper examines the indicative summarization task from a generation perspective, by first analyzing its required content via published guidelines and corpus analysis. We show how these summaries can be factored into a set of document features, and how an implemented content planner uses the topicality document feature to create indicative multidocument query-based summaries.
We report on two corpora to be used in the evaluation of component systems for the tasks of (1) linear segmentation of text and (2) summary-directed sentence extraction. We present characteristics of the corpora, methods used in the collection of user judgments, and an overview of the application of the corpora to evaluating the component system. Finally, we discuss the problems and issues with construction of the test set which apply broadly to the construction of evaluation resources for language technologies.
We present a new method for discovering a segmental discourse structure of a document while categorizing segment function. We demonstrate how retrieval of noun phrases and pronominal forms, along with a zero-sum weighting scheme, determines topicalized segmentation. Futhermore, we use term distribution to aid in identifying the role that the segment performs in the document. Finally, we present results of evaluation in terms of precision and recall which surpass earlier approaches.
In this paper, we describe a method for automatic creation of a knowledge source for text generation using information extraction over the Internet. We present a prototype system called PROFILE which uses a client-server architecture to extract noun-phrase descriptions of entities such as people, places, and organizations. The system serves two purposes: as an information extraction tool, it allows users to search for textual descriptions of entities; as a utility to generate functional descriptions (FD), it is used in a functional-unification based generation system. We present an evaluation of the approach and its applications to natural language generation and summarization.
This paper presents a method for large corpus analysis to semantically classify an entire clause. In particular, we use cooccurrence statistics among similar clauses to determine the aspectual class of an input clause. The process examines linguistic features of clauses that are relevant to aspectual classification. A genetic algorithm determines what combinations of linguistic features to use for this task.
We apply decision tree induction to the problem of discourse clue word sense disambiguation with a genetic algorithm. The automatic partitioning of the training set which is intrinsic to decision tree induction gives rise to linguistically viable rules.