Flexible Japanese Sentence Compression
by Relaxing Unit Constraints
Jun H ar ashima Sadao Kur ohashi

Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University
Yoshida-honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto, 606-8501, Japan

harashima@nlp.ist.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp, kuro@i.kyoto-u.ac.jp

ABSTRACT
Sentence compression is important in a wide range of applications in natural language processing. Previous approaches of Japanese sentence compression can be divided into two groups.
Word-based methods extract a subset of words from a sentence to shorten it, while bunsetsubased methods extract a subset of bunsetsu (where a bunsetsu is a text unit that consists ofcontent words and following function words). Basically, bunsetsu-based methods perform better than word-based methods. However, bunsetsu-based methods have the disadvantage thatthey cannot drop unimportant words from each bunsetsu because they have to follow constraints under which each bunsetsu is treated as a unit. In this paper, we propose a novel
compression method to overcome this disadvantage. Our method relaxes the constraints using
Lagrangian relaxation and shortens each bunsetsu if it contains unimportant words. Experimental results show that our method effectively compresses a sentence while preserving its
important information and grammaticality.

TITLE AND ABSTRACT IN JAPANESE

ユニット制約の緩和による柔軟な日本語文圧縮
文圧縮は，自然言語処理の様々なアプリケーションにおいて重要である．日本語文に対する既存の圧縮手法は二種類に分けられる．単語ベースの手法は文から単語集合を選出し，圧縮文とする．一方，文節ベースの手法は文から文節集合を選出し，圧縮文とする．基本的には後者の方が良く機能する．しかし，文節ベースの手法は，文節をユニットとして扱うという制約があるため，個々の文節を圧縮できない．本稿では，この欠点を克服する新しい圧縮手法を提案する．提案手法はラグランジュ緩和を用いて上の制約を緩和し，各文節を圧縮する．
実験の結果，提案手法によって原文の情報を多く保持する文法的な圧縮文を生成できることが分かった．

KEYWORDS: sentence compression, Lagrangian relaxation.
KEYWORDS IN JAPANESE: 文圧縮, ラグランジュ緩和.

Proceedings of COLING 2012: Technical Papers, pages 1097–1112,
COLING 2012, Mumbai, December 2012.

1097

1

Introduction

Sentence compression is the task of shortening a sentence while preserving its important information and grammaticality. This task is important in a wide range of applications suchas automatic summarization (Jing, 2000; Lin, 2003; Zajic et al., 2007), subtitle generation(Vandeghinste and Pan, 2004), and displaying text on small screens (Corston-Oliver, 2001).
In this paper, we propose a novel compression method for a Japanese sentence. Like otherlanguages, Japanese uses sentences composed of words. However, we can also say that aJapanese sentence is composed of bunsetsu. Bunsetsu is a text unit that consists of one or more
content words and possibly one or more function words. For example, consider the following
sentence.1(1) nihon to kanada no kokusai
kyoudoukenkyuu guru-pu ga
hakken shita
Japan CNJ Canada GEN international collaborative research group NOM discover did(An international collaborative research group between Japan and Canada made a discovery)
This sentence is composed of four bunsetsu: “nihon to”, “kanada no”, “kokusai kyoudou
kenkyuu guru-pu ga”, and “hakken shita”. As seen in this example, a Japanese sentence can beviewed as a bunsetsu sequence as well as a word sequence.
This characteristic of the Japanese language has led researchers to take two compression
approaches: word-based methods and bunsetsu-based methods. Word-based methods view asource sentence as a word sequence and generate a compressed sentence by selecting a subset of words from the source sentence (Hori and Furui, 2004; Hirao et al., 2009). However,
the methods do not take account of bunsetsu, and it is thus difficult to generate grammaticalcompressions. For example, if only content words (or only function words) in a bunsetsu areselected, the grammaticality of the corresponding part in the compressed sentence would bepoor.
We can avoid this problem using bunsetsu-based methods. Bunsetsu-based methods view asource sentence as a bunsetsu sequence and generate a compressed sentence by selecting a
subset of bunsetsu from the source sentence (Takeuchi and Matsumoto, 2001; Oguro et al.,
2002; Yamagata et al., 2006; Nomoto, 2008). Bunsetsu-based methods treat each bunsetsu asa unit. Thus, the methods do not suffer from the above problem and they can generate compressions that are more grammatically correct than those generated by word-based methods.
However, bunsetsu-based methods have a disadvantage in that they cannot shorten each bunsetsu in a source sentence. More precisely, when there is a compound noun in a bunsetsu
and the noun contains unimportant words, bunsetsu-based methods cannot drop those words
from the noun. Consider the above sentence (1) as an example. The third bunsetsu “kokusai
kyoudou kenkyuu guru-pu ga” contains a compound noun “kokusai kyoudou kenkyuu guru-pu”(international collaborative research group). Suppose that we want to drop the word “kokusai” (international) from the noun and to shorten the bunsetsu to “kyoudou kenkyuu guru-puga”. However, bunsetsu-based methods cannot perform such flexible word selection because
they have to treat each bunsetsu as it is.
1
This paper uses the abbreviations NOM (nominative), ACC (accusative), DAT (dative), ALL (allative), GEN (genitive), CMI (comitative), CNJ (conjunction), and TOP (topic marker).

1098

In this paper, we propose a novel compression method to overcome the above disadvantage.
As described above, the disadvantage results from a constraint for each bunsetsu under which
the bunsetsu has to be treated as a unit (hereafter called the unit constraint). If we ignore unit
constraints, we may be able to avoid the problem. However, if we do so, we again suffer fromthe problem of word-based methods (i.e., we will not generate grammatical compressions).
We therefore do not ignore or adhere to unit constraints, but relax them using Lagrangian
relaxation. That is, the proposed method basically follows the constraints and treats eachbunsetsu as a unit. However, if a bunsetsu contains unimportant words, our method violates
its unit constraint and drops those words from the bunsetsu. In this paper, we formulate thisidea using integer linear programming (ILP) and report the effectiveness through experiments.

2

Word-based Method

We first describe word-based methods in detail. Although several word-based methods havebeen proposed (Hori and Furui, 2004; Hirao et al., 2009), the basic idea behind the methods
is the same. We explain the idea in detail and discuss the advantage and disadvantage ofword-based methods.

2.1 Idea
In word-based methods, a source sentence is viewed as a word sequence. Let w i (i = 1, . . . , I)
denote a word in a source sentence. The basic idea underlying word-based methods is that thecompression is a subset of words with the maximum importance in a source sentence. Through
ILP, this idea is formulated as follows.
Sentence Compression (Word-based Formulation)
maximizeI∑
i=1

subject to

I
∑
i=1

x i Scor e(w i )(1)x i Leng th(w i ) ≤ L(2)

x i = 0 or 1

(i = 1, . . . , I)(3)where x i denotes a decision variable of w i that is 1 if w i is contained in a compressed sentence,and otherwise 0. Scor e(w i ) represents the importance of w i and Leng th(w i ) represents thelength of w i . L is a predefined maximum length of a compressed sentence. According to
Eq. (1), the optimal subset of words in a source sentence is selected as a compressed sentence.
In addition, according to Eq. (2), the length of the compressed sentence shall be not more thanL.

2.2 Advantage and Disadvantage
The advantage of word-based methods is that the methods can more freely select importantwords in a source sentence than bunsetsu-based methods. This is because word-based methods
do not take account of bunsetsu in a source sentence and are not limited to unit constraints.
However, due to the freeness, word-based methods have the disadvantage that they tend to
generate ungrammatical compressions. As described in Section 1, if only content words (or1099Sourcesentence… の原因と思わ遺伝子を日本とカナダの国際共同研究グループが発見した… no gennin to omowa reru idenshi wo nihon to kanada no kokusai kyoudou kenkyuu guru-pu ga hakken shita(An international collaborative research group between Japan and Canada discovered a gene that causes …)

Word

…

日本

と

カナダ

の

国際

共同

研究

グループ

が

発見

nihon

to

kanadanokokusaikyoudoukenkyuu

guru-pugahakken(Japan)(CNJ)(research)(group)(NOM)(discover)…

(Canada)

(GEN)

w11

w12

(international) (collaborative)

w13

w14

…

w15 …

Figure 1: Word-based method. A source sentence is segmented into words and a subset ofwords in the sentence is selected as the compressed sentence.
only function words) in a bunsetsu are selected, the grammaticality of the corresponding partin the compressed sentence would be poor. Consider the sentence in Figure 1. There is, forexample, the bunsetsu “kanada no” in the sentence (although word-based methods do nottake account of it). If we select only the word “kanada” (Canada) from the bunsetsu and do
not select the word “no” (GEN), the corresponding part of the compressed sentence would
not make sense. As just described, it is difficult to generate grammatical compressions using
word-based methods.

3

Bunsetsu-based Method

Like word-based methods, most previous bunsetsu-based methods (Oguro et al., 2002;
Yamagata et al., 2006; Nomoto, 2008) are based on the same idea. In this section, we explain the idea and discuss the advantages and disadvantage of bunsetsu-based methods.

3.1 Idea
Word-based methods view a source sentence as a word sequence, while bunsetsu-based methods view the sentence as a bunsetsu sequence. Let b j ( j = 1, . . . , J) denote a bunsetsu in asource sentence. The basic idea underlying bunsetsu-based methods is that the compression
is a subset of bunsetsu with the maximum importance in a source sentence. Through ILP, thisidea is formulated as follows.
Sentence Compression (Bunsetsu-based Formulation)
maximizeJ∑
j=1

subject to

J
∑
j=1

y j Scor e(b j )(4)

y j Leng th(b j ) ≤ L(5)

y j = 0 or 1

( j = 1, . . . , J)

(6)where y j denotes a decision variable of b j that is 1 if b j is contained in a compressed sentence, and otherwise 0. Scor e(b j ) represents the importance of b j and Leng th(b j ) represents
the length of b j . According to Eq. (4), the optimal subset of bunsetsu in a source sentence isselected as a compressed sentence. In addition, according to Eq. (5), the length of the compressed sentence shall be not more than L.

1100

Sourcesentence… の原因と思わ遺伝子を日本とカナダの国際共同研究グループが発見した… no gennin to omowa reru idenshi wo nihon to kanada no kokusai kyoudou kenkyuu guru-pu ga hakken shita(An international collaborative research group between Japan and Canada discovered a gene that causes …)

Bunsetsu

…

日本

と

カナダ

の

国際

共同

研究

グループ

が

発見

nihon

to

kanadanokokusaikyoudoukenkyuu

guru-pugahakken(Japan)(CNJ)(Canada)(GEN)(research)(group)(NOM)(discover)…

(international) (collaborative)

b8

b9

…

…

Figure 2: Bunsetsu-based method. A source sentence is segmented into bunsetsu and a subset
of bunsetsu in the sentence is selected as the compressed sentence. Bunsetsu-based methods
have the advantage in that they are able to use dependency information.

3.2 Advantages and Disadvantage
One advantage of bunsetsu-based methods is that the methods can generate compressions thatare more grammatical than compressions generated by word-based methods. Bunsetsu-based
methods select each bunsetsu in a source sentence just as it is. Therefore, the methods do not
suffer from the problem of word-based methods (see also Section 2.2).
Bunsetsu-based methods have the another advantage in that they are able to use dependency
information in a source sentence. In Japanese, a dependency relation is generally defined
between not a pair of words but a pair of bunsetsu. Consider the source sentence in Figure
2. In the sentence, there is the example that bunsetsu b8 depends on bunsetsu b9 . Bunsetsubased methods can use this information by adding the following simple constraint to the above
formulation.
subject to y8 ≤ y9(7)This constraint ensures that if b8 is contained in a compressed sentence, b9 is also contained in
the sentence. In this way, bunsetsu-based methods can easily use dependency information ina source sentence. On the other hand, there is a word-based method that defines dependency
relations between words in a source sentence and uses the information (Hori and Furui, 2003).
However, as described above, a dependency relation is generally defined between a pair ofbunsetsu. In the method, bunsetsu dependencies in a source sentence and complex rules arenecessary to define the word dependencies, and it is not easy to use the information.
On the other hand, as described in Section 1, the disadvantage of bunsetsu-based methods isthat they cannot shorten each bunsetsu in a source sentence. More precisely, when there is
a compound noun in a bunsetsu and the noun contains unimportant words, bunsetsu-based
methods can not drop those words from the noun. Consider again the sentence in Figure
2. Bunsetsu b9 contains a compound noun “kokusai kyoudou kenkyuu guru-pu” (international
collaborative research group). Suppose that we want to drop the word “kokusai” (international) from the noun and to shorten the bunsetsu to “kyoudou kenkyuu guru-pu ga”. However,bunsetsu-based methods cannot perform such flexible word selection because they are limited
to unit constraints.

1101

4

Proposed Method

Bunsetsu-based methods basically perform better than word-based methods, especially interms of the grammaticality of a compressed sentence. However, bunsetsu-based methods
have the disadvantage that they cannot shorten each bunsetsu in a source sentence. In thissection, we describe a novel compression method that overcomes this disadvantage.

4.1 Idea
The point of our method is to relax unit constraints responsible for the disadvantage. Under
the constraints, we have to treat each bunsetsu as a unit. If we ignore the constraints, wemay be able to avoid the problem. However, if we do so, we again suffer from the problem
of word-based methods (i.e., we will not generate grammatical compressions). Therefore, we
select a set of bunsetsu, each containing unimportant words, and relax their unit constraints.
Note that each bunsetsu that contains a compound noun (e.g., b9 in Figure 3) is selected as abunsetsu that may contain unimportant words. Conversely, we do not shorten each bunsetsu
that does not contain a compound noun (e.g., b8 in Figure 3) because such a bunsetsu has
only one content word and does not need to be shortened.
First, let us rewrite the bunsetsu-based formulation in Section 3.1. Using w i and x i instead ofb j and y j , the formulation can be rewritten as follows.
Sentence Compression (Bunsetsu-based Formulation 2)
maximizeI∑
i=1

subject to

I
∑
i=1

x i Scor e(w i )(8)x i Leng th(w i ) ≤ L(9)x i = 0 or 1

(i = 1, . . . , I)x F i rst(b j ) = x F i rst(b j )+1 = · · · = x Last(b j )(w F i rst(b j ) , . . . , w Last(b j ) ∈ b j , j = 1, . . . , J)

(10)
(11)

where F irst(b j ) represents a function that returns the index of the first word in b j , while
Last(b j ) returns that of the last word∑in b j (e.g., in Figure 3, F irst(b9 ) =∑13 and Last(b9 ) =17). In addition, we set Scor e(b j ) = wi ∈b j Scor e(w i ) and Leng th(b j ) = wi ∈b j Leng th(w i ).

The notable aspect of the above formulation is Eq. (11), which is the set of unit constraints.
Equation (11) ensures that if we select one word from a bunsetsu in a source sentence, we
also select the other words from the bunsetsu. Likewise, if we do not select one word from abunsetsu, we must also not select the other words from the bunsetsu.
The proposed method does not ignore or adhere to unit constraints but relaxes them. To dothis, we use Lagrangian relaxation, which is a classical technique for combinatorial optimization. The technique moves problematic constraints into the objective function and penalizes
the function if those constraints are not satisfied. Using the technique, we remove unit constraints for each bunsetsu that contains a compound noun.
Let BC N denotes a subset of bunsetsu, each containing a compound noun. In addition, let us
decompose a unit constraint for b j in BC N (i.e., x F i rst(b j ) = x F i rst(b j )+1 = · · · = x Last(b j ) ) into1102

Sourcesentence… の原因と思わ遺伝子を日本とカナダの国際共同研究グループが発見した… no gennin to omowa reru idenshi wo nihon to kanada no kokusai kyoudou kenkyuu guru-pu ga hakken shita(An international collaborative research group between Japan and Canada discovered a gene that causes …)

Word

…

日本

と

カナダ

の

国際

共同

研究

グループ

が

発見

nihon

to

kanadanokokusaikyoudoukenkyuu

guru-pugahakken(Japan)(CNJ)(Canada)(GEN)(research)(group)(NOM)(discover)

w9

w10

w11

w12

w15

w16

w17

w18

Bunsetsu

…

b8

Unit
constraintx9 = x10x11 = x12

(international) (collaborative)

w13

w14

…

b9
x13 = x14 = x15…

=

x16 = x17

x18 =

…

Lagrangian relaxation

Figure 3: Proposed method. Bunsetsu b9 contains a compound noun “kokusai kyoudou
kenkyuu guru-pu” (international collaborative research group). The proposed method relaxes
the unit constraint for the bunsetsu using Lagrangian relaxation.
a set of constraints: x F i rst(b j ) = x Last(b j ) , x F i rst(b j )+1 = x Last(b j ) , . . . , and x Last(b j )−1 = x Last(b j ) .
Our new formulation is given below.
Sentence Compression (Proposed Formulation)
maximizeI∑
i=1

subject to

I
∑
i=1

x i Scor e(w i ) +∑∑b j ∈BC N w i ∈b j \w Last(b j )µi,Last(b j ) (x i − x Last(b j ) )x i Leng th(w i ) ≤ L

x i = 0 or 1

(i = 1, . . . , I)x F i rst(b j ) ≤ x F i rst(b j )+1 ≤ · · · ≤ x C Last(b j ) = · · · = x Last(b j )(w F i rst(b j ) , . . . , w Last(b j ) ∈ b j , j = 1, . . . , J)

(12)

(13)
(14)
(15)

where µi,Last(b j ) is a Lagrangian multiplier provided for a constraint x i = x Last(b j ) . C Last(b j )in Eq. (15) returns the index of the last content word in b j (e.g., in Figure 3, C Last(b9 ) = 16).
A notable aspect is the second term in Eq. (12). For a bunsetsu b j in BC N (e.g., b9 in Figure3), the term penalizes the objective function if a decision variable of a word in b j (denoted asx i ) is not equal to that of the last word in b j (denoted as x Last(b j ) ). For example, if x i = 0 andx Last(b j ) = 1, the term penalizes the objective function. Thus, the proposed method basicallytreats words in b j as a unit similarly to bunsetsu-based methods. However, now there is noconstraint under which x F i rst(b j ) = x F i rst(b j )+1 = · · · = x Last(b j ) . In other words, although wehave to consider the penalty, we can set a different value for each decision variable. Supposethat w13 in b9 in Figure 3 have little importance, while the rest words in b9 have great importance. Unlike bunsetsu-based methods, the proposed method can set x 13 = 0 and the rest
decision variables to 1.
Equation (15) represents a constraint that sets the order of preference of the selection ofwords in a bunsetsu. As described above, for each bunsetsu in BC N , each decision variable1103

Algorithm 1 Solve the proposed formulation.
1: for b j ∈ BC N do
2:
for w i ∈ b j \w Last(b j ) do
3:(0)µi,Last(b ) ← 0
jend for
5: end for
6: for t ∈ {1, . . . , T } do(t−1)
7:x (t) ← arg max Eq. (12) (Note that µi,Last(b ) is used as µi,Last(b j ) in Eq. (12)
4:

j

x

8:

9:
10:

for b j ∈ BC N do
for w i ∈ b j \w Last(b j ) do
(t−1)

(t)

(t)

(t)

µi,Last(b ) ← µi,Last(b ) − α(t) (x i − x Last(b ) )end for12:
end for
13: end for
14: return x (T )
11:

j

j

j

can take a different value from other variables. However, care must be taken in setting eachvariable. More precisely, latter words in a bunsetsu generally should not be dropped before theearlier words are dropped. One reason for this is that function words are located in the latterpart of a bunsetsu. Another is that former words within a Japanese compound noun basicallymodify the latter words (i.e., the latter words are syntactically more important than the former
words). We thus add a constraint to our formulation under which we prioritize latter words ina bunsetsu.
We set x C Last(b j ) = · · · = x Last(b j ) in the latter part of Eq. (15). The purpose is to treat function
words in a bunsetsu in BC N as a unit and select at least one content word from the bunsetsu.
Furthermore, using this equation, we can retain a unit constraint for each bunsetsu that does
not contain a compound noun (i.e., for such bunsetsu, Eq. (15) is the same as Eq. (11)).
Of course, there are exceptions to Eq. (15), especially proper nouns. For example, if we drop
the first word from the compound noun “murayama tomiichi syusyou”, an unlikely noun “tomiichi syusyou” would be generated (“murayama”, “tomiichi”, and “syusyou” meaning Murayama,
Tomiichi, and prime minister, respectively). In this case, we need to recognize the family name(“murayama”), the last name (“tomiichi”), and the title (“syusyou”) and drop the words in thefollowing order: last name, family name, and title. In our experiments described in the following section, we handle this exception for person names. However, we do not handle exceptions
about other proper nouns such as organization names. We leave this for our future work.
Finally, we present an algorithm to solve our formulation in Algorithm 1. In the algorithm,
T denotes the number of iterations and α(t) denotes a parameter that determines a step size
to update each Lagrangian multiplier (see (Korte and Vygen, 2008) for detail). Using thisalgorithm, each multiplier is updated and a subset of words in a source sentence is selected
so that a compression produced by our method is as similar to that produced by bunsetsubased methods as possible. However, as described in the previous paragraphs, if bunsetsu
contain unimportant words, our method prioritizes to violate their unit constraints and drop
the unimportant words.

1104

4.2 Advantages
Compared with word-based and bunsetsu-based methods, the proposed method has at least
three advantages. First, our method can generate compressions that are more grammaticalthan compressions generated with word-based methods. This is because our method is loosely
based on bunsetsu-based methods and basically treats each bunsetsu in a source sentence as it
is.
Second, unlike word-based methods, our method can easily use dependency information in asource sentence. This is again because our method is loosely based on bunsetsu-based methods. For example, bunsetsu b8 in Figure 3 depends on bunsetsu b9 (see also Figure 2). We canuse this information employing the following constraint.
subject to x 12 ≤ x 17

(16)

That is, we introduce a constraint between the last words of the bunsetsu. In this way, when b8
is contained in a compressed sentence, we can ensure that b9 is also contained in the sentence
regardless of whether the bunsetsu are shortened.
Third, unlike bunsetsu-based methods, our method can shorten a bunsetsu in a source sentence. Since bunsetsu-based methods are limited by unit constraints, they have to treat eachbunsetsu as a unit. Thus, even if there are unimportant words in a bunsetsu, the methods do
not drop those words from the bunsetsu. On the other hand, our method relaxes unit constraints using Lagrangian relaxation. Thus, our method has the ability to drop unimportantwords from a bunsetsu, even though it is loosely based on bunsetsu-based methods.

5

Experiments

In this section, we report two experiments conducted to evaluate the proposed method.

5.1 Test Set
There is no standard test set for Japanese sentence compression. We therefore constructed a
test set to evaluate the proposed method. The construction process is as follows.
First, we extracted 240 sentences from Kyoto University Text Corpus (Kurohashi and Nagao,
1998),2 a parsed corpus of Mainichi Shimbun 1995. More precisely, we extracted sentencesthat satisfied all of the following three conditions. (1) The sentence was a lead sentence(the first sentence of an article). Lead sentences are often used in experiments for sentencecompression because they can be compressed without consideration of their context. (2) The
length of the sentence was not too short and not too long. We employed the number ofcharacters in a sentence as the sentence length and extracted sentences not shorter than 51
characters and not longer than 100 characters. (3) The sentence did not contain parentheses.
This condition was considered because we found that even human subjects often could notcompress content in parentheses (typically speech). From the 409 extracted sentences thatsatisfied these three conditions, we randomly selected 240 sentences for our experiments.
For each of the 240 sentences, two subjects produced compressed versions. The compression
ratio was set to 0.7. For example, if the length of a sentence was 100 characters, each subject
was asked to produce a compressed sentence whose length was not longer than 70 characters.
2

http://nlp.ist.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp/EN/index.php?Kyoto%20University%20Text%20Corpus

1105

Avg. # of characters per source sentence
Avg. # of words per source sentence
Avg. # of bunsetsu per source sentence
Avg. # of bunsetsu with a compound noun per source sentence

75.1
44.6
14.5
5.3

Table 1: Statistics of our test set.
Finally, from the 240 groups of a source sentence and its two compressed versions, we randomly selected 160 groups as our test set. We used the remaining 80 groups as a development
set to tune the proposed method. The statistics of our test set are given in Table 1.

5.2 Methods
In our experiments, we compared the outputs of the following methods.
WORD (RANDOM) Word-based method. This method randomly selected a subset of words
from a source sentence as the compressed sentence.
WORD Word-based method described in Section 2.1. The optimal subset of words in a source
sentence was selected using ILP.
BNST (RANDOM) Bunsetsu-based method that randomly selected a subset of bunsetsu froma source sentence as the compressed sentence.
BNST Bunsetsu-based method described in Section 3.1. The optimal subset of bunsetsu in asource sentence was selected using ILP.
BNST w/ DPND Bunsetsu-based method. We added dependency constraints to BNST.
PROP Proposed method described in Section 4.1. Using Lagrangian relaxation, unimportantwords were dropped from a compound noun in a bunsetsu.
PROP w/ DPND Proposed method. We added dependency constraints to PROP.
HUMAN Human compression. For each source sentence in our test set, one of the two compressed sentences produced by subjects were randomly selected.
For WORD, BNST, BNST w/ DPND, PROP, and PROP w/ DPND, we used lp_solve (a mixed ILP
solver3 ). In addition, we set Scor e(w i ) and Scor e(b j ) as follows. First, from articles in thenewspaper Mainichi Shimbun from 1991 to 2002, we extracted pairs of a lead sentence and atitle that could be viewed as a source sentence and its pseudo compression. Note that articles
in 1995 were excluded because they overlapped with our test set. Moreover, we viewed a leadsentence and a title as a source sentence and its pseudo compression if the lead sentence contained more than 80% of content words in the title. We then calculated the rate of occurrenceof a word in the titles to that in the lead sentences. For example, if a word appeared 50 times
in the titles and 100 times in the lead sentences, the∑rate of occurrence of the word was 0.5.
We used this rate as Scor e(w i ) and set Scor e(b j ) = wi ∈bJ Scor e(w i ).

Furthermore, we set α(t) = α(0) /t for PROP and PROP w/ DPND. Note that α(0) was set to0.02 according to our development set. T was set to 100.
3lpsolve.sourceforge.net/5.51106

WORD (RANDOM)WORDBNST (RANDOM)BNSTBNST w/ DPND
PROP
PROP w/ DPND

ROUGE 1ROUGE 2

0.690
0.736
0.679
0.745
0.772†
0.751
0.796†‡

0.409
0.540
0.529
0.615
0.653†
0.616
0.671†‡

Table 2: Information content in a compressed sentence. † and ‡ mark statistically significant
improvement over BNST and BNST w/ DPND with p < 0.01, respectively.

5.3 Information Content of a Compressed Sentence
In the first experiment, we examined how well our method performed in preserving important
information in a source sentence. Using the methods described in the previous section, we
compressed each source sentence in our test set. The compression ratio was set to 0.7. We
then computed Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE) scores (Lin, 2004)
for each of the methods. That is, we measured the n-gram overlap between the outputs ofeach method and those of human subjects. In the calculation of ROUGE, stopwords were
not removed. In addition, each word in a compression was normalized using the Japanesemorphological analyzer JUMAN (Kurohashi et al., 1994).
Table 2 gives the results. We can see that PROP significantly outperformed WORD, especiallyin terms of ROUGE 2. The reason for this is that unlike WORD, PROP basically selected words
in each bunsetsu in a source sentence as a unit.
When dependency constraints were not considered, PROP performed better than BNST. However, the performance differences between them were small and only the difference in ROUGE
1 was statistically significant (Wilcoxon signed-rank test, p < 0.05). On the other hand, when
dependency constraints were considered, PROP significantly outperformed BNST. This time,the differences in ROUGE 1 and ROUGE 2 were both statistically significant (p < 0.01).
We found that the differences between PROP w/ DPND and BNST w/ DPND were due to thenumber of available bunsetsu that each method could select. More precisely, PROP w/ DPND
selected 4.6% more (shortened) bunsetsu in a source sentence than BNST w/ DPND. Supposethat bunsetsu b j is located at a deep node in a dependency tree of a source sentence (i.e., b jdepends on b j ′ and b j ′ depends on b j ′′ and ... depends on bJ ). To select b j , both methods
first have to select from b j ′ to bJ owing to the dependency constraints. However, since there
is a length constraint, it is usually difficult to select b j at such a deep node even if b j contains
important words. However, PROP w/ DPND has more chance of selecting b j than BNST w/
DPND. This is because PROP w/ DPND can make room to select b j by dropping unimportantwords from other bunsetsu. In this way, PROP w/ DPND selected more bunsetsu that contained
important words and achieved higher performance than BNST w/ DPND.
In contrast, when dependency constraints were not considered, the number of (shortened)bunsetsu that PROP selected was not so different from the number of that BNST selected(the difference was 2.4%). This is because PROP ignored dependency constraints and almost
greedily selected bunsetsu that were composed of many important words. In other words,
PROP had less opportunity to drop unimportant words. As a result, the differences between
the performances of the two methods were not so large.

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Grammaticality
WORD
BNST
BNST w/ DPND
PROP
PROP w/ DPND
HUMAN

1.50
2.23
4.15
2.18
4.14
4.85

Table 3: Grammaticality of a compressed sentence. The score ranges from 1 to 5: 1 (verypoor), 2 (poor), 3 (average), 4 (good), and 5 (very good).

5.4 Grammaticality of a Compressed Sentence
In the second experiment, we examined how well our method performed in producing grammatical compressions. We randomly selected 50 source sentences from our test set and obtained the outputs of six methods for those sentences. Note that the six methods were WORD,
BNST, BNST w/ DPND, PROP, PROP w/ DPND, and HUMAN. Then, for each of the 50 source
sentences, we presented the six outputs to five subjects and asked them to rate the outputs interms of grammaticality. The subjects were all native Japanese speakers and did not include
the two subjects who constructed our test set. They were told that all outputs were automatically generated. For each of the source sentences, the order of the outputs was randomized.
Table 3 presents the results. From the table, we can confirm that PROP produces compressions that are more grammatically correct than the compressions produced by WORD. Thisis because PROP was loosely based on bunsetsu-based methods and basically selected eachbunsetsu as a unit.
For the same reason, PROP achieved comparable performance with BNST. Note that the performance of PROP was slightly worse than that of BNST. This is because words that should
not be dropped from a bunsetsu were dropped by PROP. For example, PROP shortened thebunsetsu “unyu syou wa” to “shou wa” (“unyu”, “syou”, and “wa” mean transport, ministry, andTOP, respectively). In Kyoto University Text Corpus, which we used in our experiments, “shou”(ministry) was tagged as a noun. However, unlike usual nouns, the word cannot be located at
the beginning of a bunsetsu. This is because in Japanese, the word has a strong suffix nature.
Thus, we must not drop “unyu” (transport) from the bunsetsu and we should treat “unyu”(transport) and “syou” (ministry) as a unit. We found that most errors arising when employing
our method related to such words, which could be viewed as both a noun and suffix (e.g., “kai”(meeting), “jin” (-ese)). As a future work, we need to properly handle these words.
PROP achieved good performance when we added dependency constraints to the method. The
score of PROP w/ DPND was 4.14. This result indicates that the grammaticality of the compressions produced by PROP w/ DPND was generally good. The reason why the performanceof PROP w/ DPND was slightly worse than that of BNST w/ DPND is the same as the reason
described in the previous paragraph. As seen in the first experiment, dependency constraints
were also effective in preserving important information. Thus, we can say that there is no
reason for not using the constraints in sentence compression.
To verify that the grading was consistent, we computed correlation coefficients between every
pair of our five subjects (i.e., between subjects 1 and 2, 1 and 3, . . . , and 4 and 5). Consequently, we found that the average of the coefficients was 0.45 and those coefficients were all
statistically significant (t-test, p < 0.01). These suggest that the grading was consistent.

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Source sentence
中米ホンジュラスの/軍司令官は/１５日、/４０年間に/わたり/管轄してきた/警察部隊を/文民の/指揮下に/置くと/発表した。[52](On the 15th, an army commander of Honduras, located in Central America, announced that thepolice divisions that the army had controlled for 40 years would be placed under civilian control.)WORD
中米ホンジュラスの軍司令官は日、４０年間に管轄警察部隊を文民の指揮下にと [36]Ungrammatical sentence
BNST w/ DPND
中米ホンジュラスの/軍司令官は/警察部隊を/文民の/指揮下に/置くと/発表した。[34](An army commander of Honduras, located in Central America, announced that the police divisions
would be placed under civilian control.)
PROP w/ DPND
ホンジュラスの/軍司令官は/１５日、/警察部隊を/文民の/指揮下に/置くと/発表した。[36](On the 15th, an army commander of Honduras announced that the police divisions would be placed
under civilian control.)
HUMAN
ホンジュラスの/軍司令官は/１５日、/警察部隊を/文民の/指揮下に/置くと/発表した。[36](On the 15th, an army commander of Honduras announced that the police divisions would be placed
under civilian control.)Figure 4: Example of the outputs. For explanation purposes, we inserted slashes between bunsetsu in each of the outputs except for WORD. The values in square bracket denote sentence
lengths.

5.5 Example of the Outputs
Figure 4 gives an example of the output of our method (PROP w/ DPND). For comparison, we
also show the outputs of WORD, BNST w/ DPND, and HUMAN. In this example, the source
sentence comprises 52 characters. Thus, each method was required to produce a compressed
sentence whose length was not more than 36 characters (52 × 0.7 = 36.4).

In this example, WORD produced a completely ungrammatical compression. In contrast, BNST
w/ DPND produced a good compression, which was grammatical and preserved much information in the source sentence. However, in the output of HUMAN, the first bunsetsu “中米ホンジュラスの” in the source sentence was shortened to “ホンジュラスの” (“中米”, “ホンジュラス”, and “の” mean Central America, Honduras, and GEN, respectively). BNST w/ DPND
could not perform such an operation because the method has to treat each bunsetsu as it is.
On the other hand, PROP w/ DPND could shorten the bunsetsu by dropping word “中米”,which had less importance, from the bunsetsu (Scor e(“中米”) was 0.119). Additionally, using
the room that was made by dropping the word, the method could add another bunsetsu “１５日、” to the compression (“１５”, “日”, and “、” mean 15, day, and comma, respectively).
Although there are other bunsetsu that contain compound nouns (e.g., “軍司令官は”), ourmethod did not drop any words from those bunsetsu and selected them as a unit similarly to
BNST w/ DPND (“軍”, “司令” + “官”, and “は” mean army, commander, and TOP, respectively).
This is because the words in the bunsetsu had great importance (e.g., Scor e(“軍”) was 0.378).
In this way, PROP w/ DPND could produce the same compression as HUMAN.

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6

Related Work

Sentence compression has been widely studied since the early 2000s. For the English language, Jing used multiple knowledge resources to decide which phrases in a source sentence
to remove (Jing, 2000). Knight and Marcu modeled a generative process of a source sentence
based on a noisy-channel framework and generated a compressed sentence using the model(Knight and Marcu, 2002). Turner and Charniak presented semi-supervised and unsupervised
variants of the Knight and Marcu’s model (Turner and Charniak, 2005). McDonald employed adiscriminative model to learn which words in a source sentence should be dropped (McDonald,2006). Clarke and Lapata recasted previous methods as ILP and extended those with various
constraints (Clarke and Lapata, 2008). Our work differs from these efforts in that we focus on
Japanese sentence compression.
For the Japanese language, previous compression methods can be divided into two groups:
word-based methods and bunsetsu-based methods. Hori and Furui proposed a word-based
method to summarize speech (Hori and Furui, 2004). They extracted a set of important words
from an automatically transcribed sentence. Hirao et al. also proposed a word-based method(Hirao et al., 2009). They extended Hori and Furui’s method using novel features. Unlike thesemethods, our method is loosely based on bunsetsu-based methods, and thus easily generates
grammatical compressions.
Previous bunsetsu-based methods are given below. Takeuchi and Matsumoto used a support vector machine to acquire rules for dropping unimportant bunsetsu in a source sentence(Takeuchi and Matsumoto, 2001). Oguro et al. and Yamagata et al. defined varying importance of bunsetsu and dependency and extracted the optimal subset of bunsetsu from a source
sentence (Oguro et al., 2002; Yamagata et al., 2006). Nomoto generated candidates for a compression by removing bunsetsu from a source sentence and selected the best candidate using
a conditional random field (Nomoto, 2008). Our work differs from these efforts in that our
method has the ability to drop unimportant words from a bunsetsu.
In our method, we used Lagrangian relaxation to relax unit constraints. Lagrangian relaxation
is a well known technique for combinatorial optimization and it has recently been successfully
applied to various natural language processing tasks (Koo et al., 2010; M.Rush et al., 2010;
Chang and Collins, 2011; M.Rush and Collins, 2011). However, to the best of our knowledge,
this is the first work to use the technique for sentence compression.

Conclusions and Future Work
We presented a novel compression method for a Japanese sentence. The proposed method
was loosely based on bunsetsu-based methods. Thus, unlike word-based methods, it could
easily produce grammatical compressions. Additionally, using Lagrangian relaxation, the proposed method relaxed constraints that troubled bunsetsu-based methods. In this way, unlikebunsetsu-based methods, our method could shorten each bunsetsu if it contained unimportantwords. Experimental results showed that the proposed method could preserve more information in a source sentence than word-based and bunsetsu-based methods. Furthermore, we
confirmed that our method could produce grammatical compressions similarly to bunsetsubased methods.
In future work, as described in Section 4.1, we plan to explore a technique to handle proper
nouns such as organization names. Additionally, as described in Section 5.4, we need todevelop a method to handle words that can be viewed as both a noun and suffix.

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