Towards Constructing Sports News from Live Text Commentary

In this paper, we investigate the possibility to automatically generate sports news from live text commentary scripts. As a preliminary study, we treat this task as a special kind of document summarization based on sentence extraction. We formulate the task in a supervised learning to rank framework, utilizing both traditional sentence features for generic document summarization and novelly designed task-specific features. To tackle the problem of local redundancy, we also propose a probabilistic sentence selection algorithm. Experiments on our collected data from football live commentary scripts and corresponding sports news demonstrate the feasibility of this task. Evaluation results show that our methods are indeed appropriate for this task, outperforming several baseline methods in different aspects.