tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "An Approach to Summarizing Short Stories"

This paper describes a system that produces extractive summaries of short works of literary fiction. The ultimate purpose of produced summaries is defined as helping a reader to determine whether she would be interested in reading a particular story. To this end, the summary aims to provide a reader with an idea about the settings of a story (such as characters, time and place) without revealing the plot. The approach presented here relies heavily on the notion of aspect. Preliminary results show an improvement over two naïve baselines: a lead baseline and a more sophisticated variant of it. . | An Approach to Summarizing Short Stories Anna Kazantseva The School of Information Technology and Engineering University of Ottawa ankazant@ Abstract This paper describes a system that produces extractive summaries of short works of literary fiction. The ultimate purpose of produced summaries is defined as helping a reader to determine whether she would be interested in reading a particular story. To this end the summary aims to provide a reader with an idea about the settings of a story such as characters time and place without revealing the plot. The approach presented here relies heavily on the notion of aspect. Preliminary results show an improvement over two naive baselines a lead baseline and a more sophisticated variant of it. Although modest the results suggest that using aspectual information may be of help when summarizing fiction. A more thorough evaluation involving human judges is under way. 1 Introduction In the course of recent years the scientific community working on the problem of automatic text summarization has been experiencing an upsurge. A multitude of different techniques has been applied to this end some of the more remarkable of them being Marcu 1997 Mani et al. 1998 Teufel and Moens 2002 Elhadad et al. 2005 to name just a few. These researchers worked on various text genres scientific and popular scientific articles Marcu 1997 Mani et al. 1998 texts in computational linguistics Teufel and Moens 2002 and medical texts Elhadad et al. 2002 . All these genres are examples of texts characterized by rigid structure relative abundance of surface markers and straightforwardness. Relatively few attempts have been made at summarizing less structured genres some of them being dialogue and speech summarization Zechner 2002 Koumpis et al. 2001 . The issue of summarizing fiction remains largely untouched since a few very thorough earlier works Charniak 1972 Lehnert 1982 . The work presented here seeks to fill in this gap. The ultimate .