Tailoring Text Using Topic Words: Selection and Compression

In the context of unified messaging, a textual message may have to be reduced in length for display on certain mobile devices. This paper presents a new method to extract sentences that deal with a certain topic from a given text. The approach is based on automatically computed lists of words that represent the desired topics. These word lists also give semantic hints on how to shorten sentences, extending previous methods that rely on syntactical clues only. The method has been evaluated for extraction accuracy and by human subjects for informativeness of the resulting extracts.