Using Tweets to Help Sentence Compression for News Highlights Generation

Zhongyu Wei, Yang Liu, Chen Li, Wei Gao


Abstract

We explore using relevant tweets of a given news article to help sentence compression for generating compressive news highlights. We extend an unsupervised dependency-tree based sentence compression approach by incorporating tweet information to weight the tree edge in terms of informativeness and syntactic importance. The experimental results on a public corpus that contains both news articles and relevant tweets show that our proposed tweets guided sentence compression method can improve the summarization performance significantly compared to the baseline generic sentence compression method.