To Build Text Summaries of High Quality, Nuclearity is not Sufficient

Intelligent Text Summarization

Volume

Papers from the 1998 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Researchers in discourse have long hypothesized that the nuclei of a rhetorical structure tree provide a good summary of the text for which that tree was built. In this paper, I discuss a psycholinguistic experiment that validates this hypothesis, but that also shows that the distinction between nuclei and satellites is not sufficient if we want to build summaries of very high quality. I empirically compare various techniques for mapping discourse trees into partial orders that reflect the importance of the elementary textual units in texts and I discuss both their strengths and weaknesses.