Explorations in Sentence Fusion

Sentence fusion is a text-to-text (revision-like) generation task which takes related sentences as input and merges these into a single output sentence. In this paper we describe our ongoing work on developing a sentence fusion module for Dutch. We propose a generalized version of alignment which not only indicates which words and phrases should be aligned but also labels these in terms of a small set of primitive semantic relations, indicating how words and phrases from the two input sentences relate to each other. It is shown that human labelers can perform this task with a high agreement (Fscore of .95). We then describe and evaluate our adaptation of an existing automatic alignment algorithm, and use the resulting alignments, plus the semantic labels, in a generalized fusion and generation algorithm. A small-scale evaluation study reveals that most of the resulting sentences are adequate to good.