Sentence fusion via dependency graph compression

Abstract

We present a novel unsupervised sentence fusion method which we apply to a corpus of biographies in German. Given a group of related sentences, we align their dependency trees and build a dependency graph. Using integer linear programming we compress this graph to a new tree, which we then linearize. We use GermaNet and Wikipedia for checking semantic compatibility of co-arguments. In an evaluation with human judges our method outperforms the fusion approach of Barzilay & McKeown (2005) with respect to readability. © 2008 Association for Computational Linguistics.