Paraphrastic sentence compression with a character-based metric: tightening without deletion

  • Authors:
  • Courtney Napoles;Chris Callison-Burch;Juri Ganitkevitch;Benjamin Van Durme

  • Affiliations:
  • Johns Hopkins University;Johns Hopkins University;Johns Hopkins University;Johns Hopkins University

  • Venue:
  • MTTG '11 Proceedings of the Workshop on Monolingual Text-To-Text Generation
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We present a substitution-only approach to sentence compression which "tightens" a sentence by reducing its character length. Replacing phrases with shorter paraphrases yields paraphrastic compressions as short as 60% of the original length. In support of this task, we introduce a novel technique for re-ranking paraphrases extracted from bilingual corpora. At high compression rates paraphrastic compressions outperform a state-of-the-art deletion model in an oracle experiment. For further compression, deleting from oracle paraphrastic compressions preserves more meaning than deletion alone. In either setting, paraphrastic compression shows promise for surpassing deletion-only methods.