Using Rhetorical Topics for Automatic Summarization
- Natalie M. Schrimpf (Yale University)
Abstract
Summarization involves finding the most important information in a text in order to convey the meaning of the document. In this paper, I present a method for using topic information to influence which content is selected for a summary. Texts are divided into topics using rhetorical information that creates a partition of a text into a sequence of non-overlapping topics. To investigate the effect of this topic structure, I compare the output of summarizing an entire text without topics to summarizing individual topics and combining them into a complete summary. The results show that the use of these rhetorical topics improves summarization performance compared to a summarization system that incorporates no topic information, demonstrating the utility of topic structure and rhetorical information for automatic summarization.
Keywords: automatic summarization, RST, topics
How to Cite:
Schrimpf, N. M., (2018) “Using Rhetorical Topics for Automatic Summarization”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 1(1), 125-135. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/R5SQ8XM6
Downloads:
Download PDF