CHARACTERIZATION OF TEMPORAL COMPLEMENTARITY: FUNDAMENTALS FOR MULTI-DOCUMENT SUMMARIZATION

From a set of sentence pairs (in Portuguese) manually annotated with CST (Cross-Document Structure Theory) relations (Historical background and Follow-up) that make explicit the temporal complementary among the sentences, we identified a potential set of linguistic attributes of such complementary. Using Machine Learning algorithms, we evaluate the capacity of the attributes to discriminate between Historical background and Follow-up.

JRip learned a small set of rules with high accuracy. Based on a set of 5 rules, the classifier discriminates the CST relations with 80% of accuracy. According to the rules, the occurrence of temporal expression in sentence 2 is the most discriminative feature in the task.