Using Linguistic Knowledge in Automatic Abstracting

Using Linguistic Knowledge in Automatic Abstracting Horacio Saggion Ddpartement d'Informatique et Recherche Opdrationnelle Universitd de Montrdal CP 6128, Succ Centre-Ville Montrdal, Qudbec, Canada, H3C 3J7 Fax: +1-514-343-5834 saggion@iro, umontreal, ca Abstract We present work on the automatic generation of short indicative-informative abstracts of scien- tific and technical articles. The indicative part of the abstract identifies the topics of the docu- ment while the informative part of the abstract elaborate some topics according to the reader's interest by motivating the topics, describing en- tities and defining concepts. We have defined our method of automatic abstracting by study- ing a corpus professional abstracts. The method also considers the reader's interest as essential in the process of abstracting. 1 Introduction The idea of producing abstracts or summaries by automatic means is not new, several methodologies have been proposed and tested for automatic abstracting including among others: word distribution (Luhn, 1958); rhetor- ical analysis (Marcu, 1997); and probabilistic models (Kupiec et al., 1995). Even though some approaches produce acceptable abstracts for specific tasks, it is generally agreed that the problem of coherent selection and expres- sion of information in automatic abstracting remains (Johnson, 1995). One of the main problems is how to ensure the preservation of the message of the original text if sentences picked up from distant parts of the source text are juxtaposed and presented to the reader. Rino and Scott (1996) address the problem of coherent selection for gist preservation, however they depend on the availability of a complex meaning representation which in practice is difficult to obtain from the raw text. In our work, we are concerned with the auto- matic generation of short indicative-informative abstract for technical and scientific papers. We base our methodology on a study of a corpus of professional abstracts and source or parent doc- uments. Our method also considers the reader's interest as essential in the process of abstract- ing. 2 The Corpus The production of professional abstracts has long been object of study (Cremmins, 1982). In particular, it has been argued that structural parts of parent documents such as introduc- tions and conclusions are important in order to obtain the information for the topical sentence (Endres-Niggemeyer et al., 1995). We have been investigating which kind of information is re- ported in professional abstracts as well as where the information lies in parent documents and how it is conveyed. In Figure 1, we show a pro- fessional abstract from the "Computer and Con- trol Abstracts" journal, this kind of abstract aims to alert readers about the existence of a new article in a particular field. The example contains information about the author's inter- est, the author's development and the overview of the parent document. All the information reported in this abstract was found in the in- troduction of its parent document. In order to study the aforementioned aspects, we have manually aligned sentences of 100 pro- fessional abstracts with sentences of parent doc- uments containing the information reported in the abstract. In a previous study …

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