Document Summarization via Guided Sentence Compression

Chen Li, Fei Liu, Fuliang Weng, Yang Liu

Abstract: Joint compression and summarization has been used recently to generate high quality summaries. However, such word-based joint optimization is computationally expensive. In this paper we adopt the ‘sentence compression + sentence selection’ pipeline approach for compressive summarization, but propose to perform summary guided compression, rather than generic sentence-based compression. To create an annotated corpus, the human annotators were asked to compress sentences while explicitly given the important summary words in the sentences. Using this corpus, we train a supervised sentence compression model using a set of word-, syntax-, and documentlevel features. During summarization, we use multiple compressed sentences in the integer linear programming framework to select salient summary sentences. Our results on the TAC 2008 and 2011 summarization data sets show that by incorporating the guided sentence compression model, our summarization system can yield significant performance gain as compared to the state-of-the-art.