Summarizing Scientific Articles: Experiments with Relevance and Rhetorical Status

In this article we propose a strategy for the summarization of scientific articles that concentrates on the rhetorical status of statements in an article: Material for summaries is selected in such a way that summaries can highlight the new contribution of the source article and situate it with respect to earlier work. We provide a gold standard for summaries of this kind consisting of a substantial corpus of conference articles in computational linguistics annotated with human judgments of the rhetorical status and relevance of each sentence in the articles. We present several experiments measuring our judges' agreement on these annotations. We also present an algorithm that, on the basis of the annotated…