Improving grammaticality in statistical sentence generation: introducing a dependency spanning tree algorithm with an argument satisfaction model

  • Authors:
  • Stephen Wann;Mark Dras;Robert Dale;Cécile Paris

  • Affiliations:
  • Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW and ICT Centre, CSIRO, Sydney, Australia;Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW;Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW;ICT Centre, CSIRO, Sydney, Australia

  • Venue:
  • EACL '09 Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Abstract-like text summarisation requires a means of producing novel summary sentences. In order to improve the grammaticality of the generated sentence, we model a global (sentence) level syntactic structure. We couch statistical sentence generation as a spanning tree problem in order to search for the best dependency tree spanning a set of chosen words. We also introduce a new search algorithm for this task that models argument satisfaction to improve the linguistic validity of the generated tree. We treat the allocation of modifiers to heads as a weighted bipartite graph matching (or assignment) problem, a well studied problem in graph theory. Using BLEU to measure performance on a string regeneration task, we found an improvement, illustrating the benefit of the spanning tree approach armed with an argument satisfaction model.