Discriminative sentence compression with conditional random fields

Abstract

The paper focuses on a particular approach to automatic sentence compression which makes use of a discriminative sequence classifier known as Conditional Random Fields (CRF). We devise several features for CRF that allow it to incorporate information on nonlinear relations among words. Along with that, we address the issue of data paucity by collecting data from RSS feeds available on the Internet, and turning them into training data for use with CRF, drawing on techniques from biology and information retrieval. We also discuss a recursive application of CRF on the syntactic structure of a sentence as a way of improving the readability of the compression it generates. Experiments found that our approach works reasonably well compared to the state-of-the-art system [Knight, K., & Marcu, D. (2002). Summarization beyond sentence extraction: A probabilistic approach to sentence compression. Artificial Intelligence 139, 91–107.].