A Joint Model for Structure-based News Genre Classification with Application to Text Summarization

Abstract

Journalists usually organize and present the contents of a news article following a well-defined structure. In this paper, we propose a novel joint model for structure-based news genre classification that simultaneously identifies one of four commonly used news structures (including Inverted Pyramid and three other structures) for a news article as well as recognizes a sequence of news elements within the article that define the corresponding news structure. Experiments show that the joint model consistently outperforms its variants that perform two tasks independently, which supports our motivation that preserving the two-way dependencies and constraints between a type of news structure and its sequence of news elements enables the model to better predict both of them. Although being not perfect, the system predicted news structure type and news elements have improved the performance of text summarization when incorporated into a recent neural network system.