Modelling events through memory-based, open-IE patterns for abstractive summarization

Abstract

Abstrective text summarization of news requires a way of representing events, such as a collection of pattern clusters in which every cluster represents an event (e.g., marriage) and every pattern in the cluster is a way of expressing the event (e.g., X married Y, X and Y tied the knot). We compare three ways of extracting event patterns: heuristics-based, compressionbased and memory-based. While the former has been used previously in multidocument abstraction, the latter two have never been used for this task. Compared with the first two techniques, the memorybased method allows for generating significantly more grammatical and informative sentences, at the cost of searching a vast space of hundreds of millions of parse trees of known grammatical utterances. To this end, we introduce a data structure and a search method that make it possible to efficiently extrapolate from every sentence the parse sub-trees that match against any of the stored utterances. © 2014 Association for Computational Linguistics.