Repository logo
 

A Proposition-based Abstractive Summarizer

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Conference Object

Change log

Authors

Fang, Y 
Zhu, H 
Muszynska, E 
Teufel, SH 

Abstract

Abstractive summarisation is not yet common amongst today's deployed and research systems. Most existing systems either extract sentences or compress individual sentences. In this paper, we present a summariser that works by a different paradigm. It is a further development of an existing summariser that has an incremental, proposition-based content selection process but lacks a natural language (NL) generator for the final output. Using an NL generator, we can now produce the summary text to directly reflect the selected propositions. Our evaluation compares textual quality of our system to the earlier preliminary output method, and also uses ROUGE to compare to various summarisers that use the traditional method of sentence extraction, followed by compression. Our results suggest that cutting out the middleman of sentence extraction can lead to better abstractive summaries.

Description

Keywords

Journal Title

Proceedings of COLING 2016

Conference Name

COLING 2016: The 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

International Committee on Computational Linguistics