Evaluating Syntactic Sentence Compression for Text Summarisation

This paper presents our work on the evaluation of syntactic based sentence compression for automatic text summarization. Sentence compression techniques can contribute to text summarization by removing redundant and irrelevant information and allowing more space for more relevant content. However, very little work has focused on evaluating the contribution of this idea for summarization. In this paper, we focus on pruning individual sentences in extractive summaries using phrase structure grammar representations. We have implemented several syntaxbased pruning techniques and evaluated them in the context of automatic summarization, using standard evaluation metrics. We have performed our evaluation on the TAC and DUC corpora using the BlogSum and MEAD summarizers. The results show that sentence pruning can achieve compression rates as low as 60%, however when using this extra space to fill in more sentences, ROUGE scores do not improve significantly.