Cohesion and coherence for Automatic Summarization

This paper presents the integration of cohesive properties of text with coherence relations, to obtain an adequate representation of text for automatic summarization. A summarizer based on Lexical Chains is enchanced with rhetorical and argumentative structure obtained via Discourse Markers. When evaluated with newspaper corpus, this integration yields only slight improvement in the resulting summaries and cannot beat a dummy baseline consisting of the first sentence in the document. Nevertheless, we argue that this approach relies on basic linguistic mechanisms and is therefore genreindependent. 1 Motivation Text Summarization (TS) can be decomposed into three phases: analysing the input text to obtain text representation, transforming it into a summary representation, and synthesizing an appropriate output form to generate the summary text. Much of the early work in summarization has been concerned with detecting relevant elements of text and presenting them in the “shortest poss...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: EACL
• Authors: Laura Alonso Alemany, María Fuentes Fort
• Keywords: Automatic Summarization, Basic Linguistic Mechanisms, EACL 2003, Motivation Text Summarization, Natural Language Processing