Theme assignment for sentences based on head-driven patterns

Abstract

Since sentences are the basic propositional units of text, knowing their themes should help in completing various tasks such as automatic summarization requiring the knowledge about the semantic content of text. Despite the importance of determining the theme of a sentence, however. few studies have investigated the problem of automatically assigning a theme to a sentence. In this paper, we examine the notion of sentence theme and propose an automatic scheme where head-driven patterns are used for theme assignment. We tested our scheme with sentences in encyclopedia articles and obtained a promising result of 98.96% in F-score for training data and 88.57% for testing data, which outperform the baseline using all but the head-driven patterns.