Discourse Segmentation for Sentence Compression

Earlier studies have raised the possibility of summarizing at the level of the sentence. This simplification should help in adapting textual content in a limited space. Therefore, sentence compression is an important resource for automatic summarization systems. However, there are few studies that consider sentence-level discourse segmentation for compression task; to our knowledge, none in Spanish. In this paper, we study the relationship between discourse segmentation and compression for sentences in Spanish. We use a discourse segmenter and observe to what extent the passages deleted by annotators fit in discourse structures detected by the system. The main idea is to verify whether the automatic discourse segmentation can serve as a basis in the identification of segments to be eliminated in the sentence compression task. We show that discourse segmentation could be a first solid step towards a sentence compression system.