Sentence extraction is a technique used for automatic summarization of a text. In this shallow approach, statistical heuristics are used to identify the most salient sentences of a text. Sentence extraction is a low-cost approach compared to more knowledge-intensive deeper approaches which require additional knowledge bases such as ontologies or linguistic knowledge. In short, sentence extraction works as a filter that allows only meaningful sentences to pass.
The major downside of applying sentence-extraction techniques to the task of summarization is the loss of coherence in the resulting summary. Nevertheless, sentence extraction summaries can give valuable clues to the main points of a document and are frequently sufficiently intelligible to human readers.
Usually, a combination of heuristics is used to determine the most important sentences within the document. Each heuristic assigns a (positive or negative) score to the sentence. After all heuristics have been applied, the highest-scoring sentences are included in the summary. The individual heuristics are weighted according to their importance.
Seminal papers which laid the foundations for many techniques used today have been published by Hans Peter Luhn in 1958 [1] and H. P Edmundson in 1969. [2]
Luhn proposed to assign more weight to sentences at the beginning of the document or a paragraph. Edmundson stressed the importance of title-words for summarization and was the first to employ stop-lists in order to filter uninformative words of low semantic content (e.g. most grammatical words such as of, the, a). He also distinguished between bonus words and stigma words, i.e. words that probably occur together with important (e.g. the word form significant) or unimportant information. His idea of using key-words, i.e. words which occur significantly frequently in the document, is still one of the core heuristics of today's summarizers. With large linguistic corpora available today, the tf–idf value which originated in information retrieval, can be successfully applied to identify the key words of a text: If for example the word cat occurs significantly more often in the text to be summarized (TF = "term frequency") than in the corpus (IDF means "inverse document frequency"; here the corpus is meant by document), then cat is likely to be an important word of the text; the text may in fact be a text about cats.
Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related to information retrieval, knowledge representation and computational linguistics, a subfield of linguistics. Typically data is collected in text corpora, using either rule-based, statistical or neural-based approaches in machine learning and deep learning.
Automatic summarization is the process of shortening a set of data computationally, to create a subset that represents the most important or relevant information within the original content. Artificial intelligence algorithms are commonly developed and employed to achieve this, specialized for different types of data.
Stop words are the words in a stop list which are filtered out before or after processing of natural language data (text) because they are deemed insignificant. There is no single universal list of stop words used by all natural language processing tools, nor any agreed upon rules for identifying stop words, and indeed not all tools even use such a list. Therefore, any group of words can be chosen as the stop words for a given purpose. The "general trend in [information retrieval] systems over time has been from standard use of quite large stop lists to very small stop lists to no stop list whatsoever".
A document-term matrix is a mathematical matrix that describes the frequency of terms that occur in each document in a collection. In a document-term matrix, rows correspond to documents in the collection and columns correspond to terms. This matrix is a specific instance of a document-feature matrix where "features" may refer to other properties of a document besides terms. It is also common to encounter the transpose, or term-document matrix where documents are the columns and terms are the rows. They are useful in the field of natural language processing and computational text analysis.
In information retrieval, tf–idf, short for term frequency–inverse document frequency, is a measure of importance of a word to a document in a collection or corpus, adjusted for the fact that some words appear more frequently in general. Like the bag-of-words model, it models a document as a multiset of words, without word order. It is a refinement over the simple bag-of-words model, by allowing the weight of words to depend on the rest of the corpus.
Text segmentation is the process of dividing written text into meaningful units, such as words, sentences, or topics. The term applies both to mental processes used by humans when reading text, and to artificial processes implemented in computers, which are the subject of natural language processing. The problem is non-trivial, because while some written languages have explicit word boundary markers, such as the word spaces of written English and the distinctive initial, medial and final letter shapes of Arabic, such signals are sometimes ambiguous and not present in all written languages.
The sequence between semantic related ordered words is classified as a lexical chain. A lexical chain is a sequence of related words in writing, spanning narrow or wide context window. A lexical chain is independent of the grammatical structure of the text and in effect it is a list of words that captures a portion of the cohesive structure of the text. A lexical chain can provide a context for the resolution of an ambiguous term and enable disambiguation of concepts that the term represents.
Multi-document summarization is an automatic procedure aimed at extraction of information from multiple texts written about the same topic. The resulting summary report allows individual users, such as professional information consumers, to quickly familiarize themselves with information contained in a large cluster of documents. In such a way, multi-document summarization systems are complementing the news aggregators performing the next step down the road of coping with information overload.
Ontology learning is the automatic or semi-automatic creation of ontologies, including extracting the corresponding domain's terms and the relationships between the concepts that these terms represent from a corpus of natural language text, and encoding them with an ontology language for easy retrieval. As building ontologies manually is extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming, there is great motivation to automate the process.
Subject indexing is the act of describing or classifying a document by index terms, keywords, or other symbols in order to indicate what different documents are about, to summarize their contents or to increase findability. In other words, it is about identifying and describing the subject of documents. Indexes are constructed, separately, on three distinct levels: terms in a document such as a book; objects in a collection such as a library; and documents within a field of knowledge.
The bag-of-words model (BoW) is a model of text which uses a representation of text that is based on an unordered collection of words. It is used in natural language processing and information retrieval (IR). It disregards word order but captures multiplicity.
Document clustering is the application of cluster analysis to textual documents. It has applications in automatic document organization, topic extraction and fast information retrieval or filtering.
Vector space model or term vector model is an algebraic model for representing text documents as vectors such that the distance between vectors represents the relevance between the documents. It is used in information filtering, information retrieval, indexing and relevancy rankings. Its first use was in the SMART Information Retrieval System.
Document Structuring is a subtask of Natural language generation, which involves deciding the order and grouping of sentences in a generated text. It is closely related to the Content determination NLG task.
In natural language processing and information retrieval, explicit semantic analysis (ESA) is a vectoral representation of text that uses a document corpus as a knowledge base. Specifically, in ESA, a word is represented as a column vector in the tf–idf matrix of the text corpus and a document is represented as the centroid of the vectors representing its words. Typically, the text corpus is English Wikipedia, though other corpora including the Open Directory Project have been used.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to natural-language processing:
In natural language processing, Entity Linking, also referred to as named-entity disambiguation (NED), named-entity recognition and disambiguation (NERD), named-entity normalization (NEN), or Concept Recognition, is the task of assigning a unique identity to entities mentioned in text. For example, given the sentence "Paris is the capital of France", the main idea is to first identify "Paris" and "France" as named entities, and then to determine that "Paris" refers to the city of Paris and not to Paris Hilton or any other entity that could be referred to as "Paris" and "France" to the french country.
Automatic taxonomy construction (ATC) is the use of software programs to generate taxonomical classifications from a body of texts called a corpus. ATC is a branch of natural language processing, which in turn is a branch of artificial intelligence.
Sketch Engine is a corpus manager and text analysis software developed by Lexical Computing since 2003. Its purpose is to enable people studying language behaviour to search large text collections according to complex and linguistically motivated queries. Sketch Engine gained its name after one of the key features, word sketches: one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour. Currently, it supports and provides corpora in over 90 languages.
Ani Nenkova is Principal Scientist at Adobe Research, currently on leave from her position as an Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, with an emphasis on developing computational methods for analysis of text quality and style, discourse, affect recognition, and summarization.