How Document Pre-processing affects Keyphrase Extraction Performance

Abstract: The SemEval-2010 benchmark dataset has brought renewed attention to the task of automatic keyphrase extraction. This dataset is made up of scientific articles that were automatically converted from PDF format to plain text and thus require careful preprocessing so that irrevelant spans of text do not negatively affect keyphrase extraction performance. In previous work, a wide range of document preprocessing techniques were described but their impact on the overall performance of keyphrase extraction models is still unexplored. Here, we re-assess the performance of several keyphrase extraction models and measure their robustness against increasingly sophisticated levels of document preprocessing.

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Recent years have seen a surge of interest in automatic keyphrase extraction, thanks to the availability of the SemEval-2010 benchmark dataset BIBREF0 . This dataset is composed of documents (scientific articles) that were automatically converted from PDF format to plain text. As a result, most documents contain irrelevant pieces of text (e.g. muddled sentences, tables, equations, footnotes) that require special handling, so as to not hinder the performance of keyphrase extraction systems. In previous work, these are usually removed at the preprocessing step, but using a variety of techniques ranging from simple heuristics BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 to sophisticated document logical structure detection on richly-formatted documents recovered from Google Scholar BIBREF4 . Under such conditions, it may prove difficult to draw firm conclusions about which keyphrase extraction model performs best, as the impact of preprocessing on overall performance cannot be properly quantified.
While previous work clearly states that efficient document preprocessing is a prerequisite for the extraction of high quality keyphrases, there is, to our best knowledge, no empirical evidence of how preprocessing affects keyphrase extraction performance. In this paper, we re-assess the performance of several state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction models at increasingly sophisticated levels of preprocessing. Three incremental levels of document preprocessing are experimented with: raw text, text cleaning through document logical structure detection, and removal of keyphrase sparse sections of the document. In doing so, we present the first consistent comparison of different keyphrase extraction models and study their robustness over noisy text. More precisely, our contributions are:
The SemEval-2010 benchmark dataset BIBREF0 is composed of 244 scientific articles collected from the ACM Digital Library (conference and workshop papers). The input papers ranged from 6 to 8 pages and were converted from PDF format to plain text using an off-the-shelf tool. The only preprocessing applied is a systematic dehyphenation at line breaks and removal of author-assigned keyphrases. Scientific articles were selected from four different research areas as defined in the ACM classification, and were equally distributed into training (144 articles) and test (100 articles) sets. Gold standard keyphrases are composed of both author-assigned keyphrases collected from the original PDF files and reader-assigned keyphrases provided by student annotators.
Long documents such as those in the SemEval-2010 benchmark dataset are notoriously difficult to handle due to the large number of keyphrase candidates (i.e. phrases that are eligible to be keyphrases) that the systems have to cope with BIBREF6 . Furthermore, noisy textual content, whether due to format conversion errors or to unusable elements (e.g. equations), yield many spurious keyphrase candidates that negatively affect keyphrase extraction performance. This is particularly true for systems that make use of core NLP tools to select candidates, that in turn exhibit poor performance on degraded text. Filtering out irrelevant text is therefore needed for addressing these issues.
In this study, we concentrate our effort on re-assessing keyphrase extraction performance on three increasingly sophisticated levels of document preprocessing described below.
Table shows the average number of sentences and words along with the maximum possible recall for each level of preprocessing. The maximum recall is obtained by computing the fraction of the reference keyphrases that occur in the documents. We observe that the level 2 preprocessing succeeds in eliminating irrelevant text by significantly reducing the number of words (-19%) while maintaining a high maximum recall (-2%). Level 3 preprocessing drastically reduce the number of words to less than a quarter of the original amount while interestingly still preserving high recall.
We re-implemented five keyphrase extraction models : the first two are commonly used as baselines, the third is a resource-lean unsupervised graph-based ranking approach, and the last two were among the top performing systems in the SemEval-2010 keyphrase extraction task BIBREF0 . We note that two of the systems are supervised and rely on the training set to build their classification models. Document frequency counts are also computed on the training set. Stemming is applied to allow more robust matching. The different keyphrase extraction models are briefly described below:
Each model uses a distinct keyphrase candidate selection method that provides a trade-off between the highest attainable recall and the size of set of candidates. Table summarizes these numbers for each model. Syntax-based selection heuristics, as used by TopicRank and WINGNUS, are better suited to prune candidates that are unlikely to be keyphrases. As for KP-miner, removing infrequent candidates may seem rather blunt, but it turns out to be a simple yet effective pruning method when dealing with long documents. For details on how candidate selection methods affect keyphrase extraction, please refer to BIBREF16 .
Apart from TopicRank that groups similar candidates into topics, the other models do not have any redundancy control mechanism. Yet, recent work has shown that up to 12% of the overall error made by state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction systems were due to redundancy BIBREF6 , BIBREF17 . Therefore as a post-ranking step, we remove redundant keyphrases from the ranked lists generated by all models. A keyphrase is considered redundant if it is included in another keyphrase that is ranked higher in the list.
We follow the evaluation procedure used in the SemEval-2010 competition and evaluate the performance of each model in terms of f-measure (F) at the top INLINEFORM0 keyphrases. We use the set of combined author- and reader-assigned keyphrases as reference keyphrases. Extracted and reference keyphrases are stemmed to reduce the number of mismatches.
The performances of the keyphrase extraction models at each preprocessing level are shown in Table . Overall, we observe a significant increase of performance for all models at levels 3, confirming that document preprocessing plays an important role in keyphrase extraction performance. Also, the difference of f-score between the models, as measured by the standard deviation INLINEFORM0 , gradually decreases with the increasing level of preprocessing. This result strengthens the assumption made in this paper, that performance variation across models is partly a function of the effectiveness of document preprocessing.
Somewhat surprisingly, the ordering of the two best models reverses at level 3. This showcases that rankings are heavily influenced by the preprocessing stage, despite the common lack of details and analysis it suffers from in explanatory papers. We also remark that the top performing model, namely KP-Miner, is unsupervised which supports the findings of BIBREF6 indicating that recent unsupervised approaches have rivaled their supervised counterparts in performance.
In an attempt to quantify the performance variation across preprocessing levels, we compute the standard deviation INLINEFORM0 for each model. Here we see that unsupervised models are more sensitive to noisy input, as revealed by higher standard deviations. We found two main reasons for this. First, using multiple discriminative features to rank keyphrase candidates adds inherent robustness to the models. Second, the supervision signal helps models to disregard noise.
In Table , we compare the outputs of the five models by measuring the percentage of valid keyphrases that are retrieved by all models at once for each preprocessing level. By these additional results, we aim to assess whether document preprocessing smoothes differences between models. We observe that the overlap between the outputs of the different models increases along with the level of preprocessing. This suggests that document preprocessing reduces the effect that the keyphrase extraction model in itself has on overall performance. In other words, the singularity of each model fades away gradually with increase in preprocessing effort.
Being able to reproduce experimental results is a central aspect of the scientific method. While assessing the importance of the preprocessing stage for five approaches, we found that several results were not reproducible, as shown in Table .
We note that the trends for baselines and high ranking systems are opposite: compared to the published results, our reproduction of top systems under-performs and our reproduction of baselines over-performs. We hypothesise that this stems from a difference in hyperparameter tuning, including the ones that the preprocessing stage makes implicit. Competitors have strong incentives to correctly optimize hyperparameters, to achieve a high ranking and get more publicity for their work while competition organizers might have the opposite incentive: too strong a baseline might not be considered a baseline anymore.
We also observe that with this leveled preprocessing, the gap between baselines and top systems is much smaller, lessening again the importance of raw scores and rankings to interpret the shared task results and emphasizing the importance of understanding correctly the preprocessing stage.
In the previous sections, we provided empirical evidence that document preprocessing weighs heavily on the outcome of keyphrase extraction models. This raises the question of whether further improvement might be gained from a more aggressive preprocessing. To answer this question, we take another step beyond content filtering and further abridge the input text from level 3 preprocessed documents using an unsupervised summarization technique. More specifically, we keep the title and abstract intact, as they are the two most keyphrase dense parts within scientific articles BIBREF4 , and select only the most content bearing sentences from the remaining contents. To do this, sentences are ordered using TextRank BIBREF14 and the less informative ones, as determined by their TextRank scores normalized by their lengths in words, are filtered out.
Finding the optimal subset of sentences from already shortened documents is however no trivial task as maximum recall linearly decreases with the number of sentences discarded. Here, we simply set the reduction ratio to 0.865 so that the average maximum recall on the training set does not lose more than 5%. Table shows the reduction in the average number of sentences and words compared to level 3 preprocessing.
The performances of the keyphrase extraction models at level 4 preprocessing are shown in Table . We note that two models, namely TopicRank and TF INLINEFORM0 IDF, lose on performance. These two models mainly rely on frequency counts to rank keyphrase candidates, which in turn become less reliable at level 4 because of the very short length of the documents. Other models however have their f-scores once again increased, thus indicating that further improvement is possible from more reductive document preprocessing strategies.
In this study, we re-assessed the performance of several keyphrase extraction models and showed that performance variation across models is partly a function of the effectiveness of the document preprocessing. Our results also suggest that supervised keyphrase extraction models are more robust to noisy input.
Given our findings, we recommend that future works use a common preprocessing to evaluate the interest of keyphrase extraction approaches. For this reason we make the four levels of preprocessing used in this study available for the community.

Figure and table captions:
Table 1: Statistics computed at the different levels of document preprocessing on the training set.
Table 2: Maximum recall and average number of keyphrase candidates for each model.
Table 3: F-scores computed at the top 10 extracted keyphrases for the unsupervised (Unsup.) and supervised (Sup.) models at each preprocessing level. We also report the standard deviation across the five models for each level (σ1) and the standard deviation across the three levels for each model (σ2). α and β indicate significance at the 0.05 level using Student’s t-test against level 1 and level 2 respectively.
Table 5: Difference in f-score between our re-implementation and the original scores reported in (Hasan and Ng, 2014; Bougouin et al., 2013).
Table 6: Statistics computed at level 4 of document preprocessing on the training set. We also report the relative difference with respect to level 3 preprocessing.
Table 7: F-scores computed at the top 10 extracted keyphrases for the unsupervised (Unsup.) and supervised (Sup.) models at level 4 preprocessing. We also report the difference in f-score with level 3 preprocessing.

Questions about this paper:
what levels of document preprocessing are looked at?
what keyphrase extraction models were reassessed?

Answers:
Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3.
Answer with content missing: (LVL1, LVL2, LVL3) 
- Stanford CoreNLP
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system, ParsCIT 
- further abridge the input text from level 2 preprocessed documents to the following: title, headers, abstract, introduction, related work, background and conclusion.