Fast and Accurate Prediction of Sentence Specificity

Recent studies have demonstrated that specificity is an important characterization of texts potentially beneficial for a range of applications such as multi-document news summarization and analysis of science journalism. The feasibility of automatically predicting sentence specificity from a rich set of features has also been confirmed in prior work. In this paper we present a practical system for predicting sentence specificity which exploits only features that require minimum processing and is trained in a semi-supervised manner. Our system outperforms the state-of-the-art method for predicting sentence specificity and does not require part of speech tagging or syntactic parsing as the prior methods did. With the tool that we developed --- Speciteller --- we study the role of specificity in sentence simplification. We show that specificity is a useful indicator for finding sentences that need to be simplified and a useful objective for simplification, descriptive of the differences between original and simplified sentences.