Multi-Sentence Compression: Finding Shortest Paths in Word Graphs

Abstract

We consider the task of summarizing a cluster of related sentences with a short sentence which we call multi-sentence compression and present a simple approach based on shortest paths in word graphs. The advantage and the novelty of the proposed method is that it is syntax-lean and requires little more than a tokenizer and a tagger. Despite its simplicity, it is capable of generating grammatical and informative summaries as our experiments with English and Spanish data demonstrate.