Foreground and Background Text in Retrieva

Acquiring (and Using) Linguistic (and World) Knowledge for Information Access

Volume

Papers from the 2002 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Our hypothesis is that certain clauses have foreground functions in text, while other clauses have background functions and that these functions are expressed or re- flected in the syntactic structure of the clause. Presumably these clauses will have differing utility for automatic approaches to text understanding; a summarization system might want to utilize background clauses to capture commonalities between numbers of documents while an indexing system might use foreground clauses in order to capture specific characteristics of a certain document.