RALI-OLST-ILFC Weekly Talks

On Wednesdays at 11:30 a.m. (Montreal time), we hold a one-hour talk on a language processing or linguistics topic. It is typically offered in hybrid mode (in person/videoconference). Once a month, the talk is organized by the French research group Linguistique Informatique, Formelle et de Terrain.

Distributional Semantics for Robust Automatic Summarization

Jackie Cheung (jcheung <at> cs (point) mcgill (point) ca)

Université McGill

Wednesday 4 November 2015 at 11:30 AM

Salle 3195, Pavillon André-Aisenstadt


In automatic summarization, interest is shifting ever more from bigram-based extractive techniques towards text-to-text and fully abstractive methods. A major challenge in the field is to determine what kind of semantic representations is rich enough to support useful inferences yet easily learnable from data. In this talk, I discuss how distributional semantics (DS) can help to determine the content and form of summaries in support of these goals. First, I present a method that integrates phrasal DS representations into a probabilistic content model in order to learn about the important events and slots in a domain. This method aims to use automatically learned domain knowledge to inform content selection, and is validated by an extractive summarization experiment. Then, I discuss the use of DS within a text-to-text sentence fusion setting, in which parts of multiple source text sentences are fused together to form a novel output sentence. This work points to the potential of DS to support broad-coverage natural language generation applications.


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