CONDENSED REPRESENTATION OF SENTENCES IN GRAPHIC DISPLAYS OF TEXT STRUCTURES
| Published date | 01 April 1990 |
| Date | 01 April 1990 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026864 |
| Pages | 339-352 |
| Author | TIMOTHY C. CRAVEN |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
CONDENSED REPRESENTATION OF SENTENCES
IN GRAPHIC DISPLAYS OF TEXT STRUCTURES
TIMOTHY
C. CRAVEN
School
of
Library and Information Science
University
of
Western
Ontario,
London,
Ontario
N6G
1H1,
Canada
This
article is concerned with how sentences may be represented briefly but
informatively
in graphic
displays
of
a
sentence dependency
structure.
Different
automatic
abbreviation schemes were assessed on a sample data set for
compression
and ambiguity. 'Speedwriting' of words longer than five letters
yielded
a compression to 80%
of
the
source text, with very low
ambiguity.
This
and
two other automatic notemaking-like techniques have been implemented
as
options in the
TEXNET
text structure management system.
INTRODUCTION
THIS ARTICLE REPORTS on one aspect of an ongoing research project.
This larger research project is aimed at developing techniques for the
generation of a variety of customised abstracts and extracts on demand from
coded texts. The general methodology of the larger research is one of
prototyping experimental software to test various approaches. The chief
prototype currently being developed in the research is a text network
management system, known provisionally as TEXNET.
Features of TEXNET have been described in detail elsehwere
[1-4].
Here, it
will be sufficient to note two points. First, TEXNET
is
centered around a model
consisting of the sentences of the original text plus links representing sentence
dependencies: a later sentence in a text is considered to be dependent on an
earlier sentence if the later sentence needs information from the earlier
sentence in order to be understood. Second, TEXNET allows human inter-
vention in defining or validating a sentence dependency structure; thus, the
human intervener needs some sort of display of the structure. Choice of an
appropriate form of display becomes more and
more
important
as the size
and
complexity of the structure increases.
This article is concerned with how sentences may be represented briefly but
informatively in graphic displays of a sentence dependency
structure.
The aim
of the representation should be, in a limited space, to remind the user as
much as possible of
the
content of each sentence and how it
fits
into the overall
text.
Journal
of
Documentation,
Vol. 46, No. 4, December 1990, pp.
339-352.
339
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