Abstract
This paper proposes a method of selecting important sentences from a text based on the evaluation of the connectivity between sentences by using surface information. We assume that the title of a text is the most concise statement which expresses the most essential information of the text, and that the closer a sentence relates to an important sentence, the more important this sentence is. The importance of a sentence is defined as the connectivity between the sentence and the title. The connectivity between two sentences is measured based on correference between a pronoun and a preceding (pro) noun, and on lexical cohesion of lexical items. In an experiment with 80 English texts, which consist of an average of 29.0 sentences, the proposed method has marked 78.2% recall and 57.7% precision, with the selection ratio being 25%. The recall and precision values surpass those achieved by conventional methods, which means that our method is more effective in abridging relatively short texts.
