Title
Discourse indicators for content selection in summarization
Abstract
We present analyses aimed at eliciting which specific aspects of discourse provide the strongest indication for text importance. In the context of content selection for single document summarization of news, we examine the benefits of both the graph structure of text provided by discourse relations and the semantic sense of these relations. We find that structure information is the most robust indicator of importance. Semantic sense only provides constraints on content selection but is not indicative of important content by itself. However, sense features complement structure information and lead to improved performance. Further, both types of discourse information prove complementary to non-discourse features. While our results establish the usefulness of discourse features, we also find that lexical overlap provides a simple and cheap alternative to discourse for computing text structure with comparable performance for the task of content selection.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2010
SIGDIAL Conference
discourse information,discourse relation,structure information,sense feature,important content,graph structure,discourse indicator,content selection,text structure,discourse feature,semantic sense
Field
DocType
Citations 
Automatic summarization,Multi-document summarization,Graph,Information retrieval,Computer science,Document summarization,Text structure,Artificial intelligence,Natural language processing
Conference
16
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.69
18
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Annie Louis144324.78
Aravind K. Joshi23479791.99
Ani Nenkova31831109.14