Paraphrasing for condensation in journal abstracting

Abstract

When authors of empirical science articles write abstracts, they employ a wide variety of distinct linguistic operations which interact to condense and rephrase a subset of sentences from the source text. An on-going comparison of biological and biomedical journal articles with their author-written abstracts is providing a basis for a more linguistically detailed model of abstract derivation using syntactic representations of selected source sentences. The description makes use of rich dictionary information to formulate paraphrasing rules of differing degrees of generality, including some which are sublanguage-specific, and others which appear valid in several languages when formulated using "lexical functions" to express important semantic relationships between lexical items. Some paraphrase operations may use both lexical functions and rhetorical relations between sentences to reformulate larger chunks of text in a concise abstract sentence. The descriptive framework is computable and utilizes existing linguistic resources.