Abstract:
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.