Constraint-Based Sentence Compression: An Integer Programming Approach

James Clarke, Mirella Lapata

Abstract: The ability to compress sentences while preserving their grammaticality and most of their meaning has recently received much attention. Our work views sentence compression as an optimisation problem. We develop an integer programming formulation and infer globally optimal compressions in the face of linguistically motivated constraints. We show that such a formulation allows for relatively simple and knowledge-lean compression models that do not require parallel corpora or large-scale resources. The proposed approach yields results comparable and in some cases superior to state-of-the-art.