Use of a text grammar for generating highlight abstracts of magazine articles

• Published in: Journal of documentation Vol. 56; no. 5; pp. 520 - 539
• Main Authors: Moens, Marie-Francine, Dumortier, Jos
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bradford MCB UP Ltd 01.10.2000; Emerald; Aslib, etc
• Subjects: Abstracting; Abstracts; Automatic abstracting; Automation; Content analysis; Development; Discourse; Electronic Journals; Exact sciences and technology; Grammar; Indexing. Classification. Abstracting. Syntheses; Information and communication sciences; Information and document structure and analysis; Information processing and retrieval; Information retrieval systems. Information and document management system; Information science. Documentation; Information Seeking; Knowledge Representation; Language; Parsing; Relevance (Information Retrieval); Sciences and techniques of general use; System design and modelling; Text analysis; Text Handling; Text Structure; Language; Development; Databases; Performance evaluation; Discourse; Linguistic analysis; Article; Example; Knowledge representation; Database; System design; Abstracting; Parser; Automated processing
• ISSN: 0022-0418; 1758-7379
• DOI: 10.1108/EUM0000000007126

Browsing a database of article abstracts is one way to select and buy relevant magazine articles online. Our research contributes to the design and development of text grammars for abstracting texts in unlimited subject domains. We developed a system that parses texts based on the text grammar of a specific text type and that extracts sentences and statements which are relevant for inclusion in the abstracts. The system employs knowledge of the discourse patterns that are typical of news stories. The results are encouraging and demonstrate the importance of discourse structures in text summarisation.