Sentence Reduction removes non-essential information from a sentence.
Sample Program Output
You can compare the program output with the reduced sentence by professionals.
Example 1
Original Sentence: When it arrives sometime next
year in new TV sets, the V-chip will give parents a new and potentially
revolutionary device to block out programs they don't want their
children to see.
Reduction Program: The V-chip will give
parents a new and potentially revolutionary device to block out programs they don't want their children to see.
Example 2
Original Sentence: Som and Hoffman's creation would allow broadcasters to insert multiple
ratings into a show, enabling the V-chip to filter out racy or violent material
but leave unexceptional portions of a show alone.
Reduction Program:Som and Hoffman's creation would allow broadcasters to insert multiple
ratings into a show.
Example 3
Original Sentence: Consumer groups are worried that a pending decision
by federal regulators eventually could lead to people paying per-minute rates for using the Internet, just as they do now with long-distance phone calls.
Reduction Program: Consumer groups are worried that a pending decision could lead to people paying per-minute rates for using the Internet.
Example 4
Original Sentence: The two men, longtime partners in a Rockville company that makes software for closed-captioning TV programs, have developed new software that they say
would make the V-chip a surgical tool, rather than a sledgehammer.
Reduction Program: The two men
have developed new software that they say
would make the V-chip a surgical tool, rather than a sledgehammer.
Example 5
Original Sentence: A report being released today by the American Association of University Women's
Educational Foundation found that girls lag behind boys in the number and level
of computer courses they enroll in, a gap that persists through college and into
the lucrative technology career market.
Reduction Program: A report being released today by the American Association of University Women's
Educational Foundation found that girls lag behind boys in the number and level
of computer courses they enroll in, a gap that persists through college and into
the lucrative technology career market. (no reduction)
Output from Human Professionals
Example 1 The V-chip will give
parents a device to block out programs they don't want their children to
see.
Example 2 Som and Hoffman's creation would allow broadcasters to insert multiple
ratings into a show.
Example 3 Consumer groups are worried that a pending decision could lead paying per-minute rates for using the Internet.
Example 4 The two men
have developed new software that they say
would make the V-chip a surgical tool, rather than a sledgehammer.
Example 5 A report being released today by the American Association of University Women's
Educational Foundation found that girls lag behind boys in the number and level
of computer courses they enroll in, a gap that persists through college and into
the lucrative technology career market. (no reduction)
Reduction based on Multiple Types of Knowledge
The reduction program is based on 3 types of knowledge: context
information, the probabilities from the training corpus, and grammar
knowledge from a lexicon.
Step 1: Determine which components in a sentence are complimentary in order to keep the sentence grammatically correct, using the syntactic knowledge in a large-scale lexicon we combined from English Verb Classes and Alternations, COMLEX, and WordNet.
Step 2: Determine which components in a sentence are important in the context, using the lexical links between words.
Step 3: Derive from the training corpus (which consists of reduced sentences by humans) what components in a sentence are likely to be removed.
Step 4: Combine the evidence from above 3 steps; reduce a sentence when all the evidence show the sentence component is reducible.