Syntax-Driven Sentence Revision for Broadcast News Summarization

We propose a method of revising lead sentences in a news broadcast. Unlike many other methods proposed so far, this method does not use the coreference relation of noun phrases (NPs) but rather, insertion and substitution of the phrases modifying the same head chunk in lead and other sentences. The method borrows an idea from the sentence fusion methods and is more general than those using NP coreferencing as ours includes them. We show in experiments the method was able to find semantically appropriate revisions thus demonstrating its basic feasibility. We also show that that parsing errors mainly degraded the sentential completeness such as grammaticality and redundancy.