Sentence compression is the task of producing a summary at the sentence level. This paper focuses on three aspects of this task which have not received detailed treatment in the literature: training requirements, scalability, and automatic evaluation. We provide a novel comparison between a supervised constituent-based and an weakly supervised word-based compression algorithm and examine how these models port to different domains (written vs. spoken text). To achieve this, a human-authored compression corpus has been created and our study highlights potential problems with the automatically gathered compression corpora currently used. Finally, we assess whether automatic evaluation measures can be used to determine compression quality.
Clarke et al. (Sun,) studied this question.