Recent approaches to English-language sentence compression rely on parallel corpora consisting of sentence-compression pairs. However, a sentence may be shortened in many different ways, which each might be suited to the needs of a particular application. Therefore, in this work, we collect and model crowdsourced judgements of the acceptability of many possible sentence shortenings. We then show how a model of such judgements can be used to support a flexible approach to the compression task. We release our model and dataset for future work.
Researchers have been studying extractive sentence compression for nearly two decades @cite_24 @cite_37 @cite_7 . Recent approaches are often based on a large compression corpus, https: github.com google-research-datasets sentence-compression which was automatically constructed by using news headlines to identify gold standard'' shortenings @cite_43 . State-of-the-art models trained on this dataset @cite_7 @cite_45 @cite_6 can reproduce gold compressions (i.e. perfect token-for-token match) with accuracy higher than 30
@cite_37 @cite_7 @cite_6 @cite_24 @cite_43 @cite_45
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Sentence compression holds promise for many applications ranging from summarization to subtitle generation. Our work views sentence compression as an optimization problem and uses integer linear programming (ILP) to infer globally optimal compressions in the presence of linguistically motivated constraints. We show how previous formulations of sentence compression can be recast as ILPs and extend these models with novel global constraints. Experimental results on written and spoken texts demonstrate improvements over state-of-the-art models. We present an LSTM approach to deletion-based sentence compression where the task is to translate a sentence into a sequence of zeros and ones, corresponding to token deletion decisions. We demonstrate that even the most basic version of the system, which is given no syntactic information (no PoS or NE tags, or dependencies) or desired compression length, performs surprisingly well: around 30 of the compressions from a large test set could be regenerated. We compare the LSTM system with a competitive baseline which is trained on the same amount of data but is additionally provided with all kinds of linguistic features. In an experiment with human raters the LSTMbased model outperforms the baseline achieving 4.5 in readability and 3.8 in informativeness. When humans produce summaries of documents, they do not simply extract sentences and concatenate them. Rather, they create new sentences that are grammatical, that cohere with one another, and that capture the most salient pieces of information in the original document. Given that large collections of text abstract pairs are available online, it is now possible to envision algorithms that are trained to mimic this process. In this paper, we focus on sentence compression, a simpler version of this larger challenge. We aim to achieve two goals simultaneously:our compressions should be grammatical, and they should retain the most important pieces of information. These two goals can conflict. We devise both noisy-channel and decision-tree approaches to the problem, and we evaluate results against manual compressions and a simple baseline. A major challenge in supervised sentence compression is making use of rich feature representations because of very scarce parallel data. We address this problem and present a method to automatically build a compression corpus with hundreds of thousands of instances on which deletion-based algorithms can be trained. In our corpus, the syntactic trees of the compressions are subtrees of their uncompressed counterparts, and hence supervised systems which require a structural alignment between the input and output can be successfully trained. We also extend an existing unsupervised compression method with a learning module. The new system uses structured prediction to learn from lexical, syntactic and other features. An evaluation with human raters shows that the presented data harvesting method indeed produces a parallel corpus of high quality. Also, the supervised system trained on this corpus gets high scores both from human raters and in an automatic evaluation setting, significantly outperforming a strong baseline.