In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.

Input: Consider Input: We investigate the use of temporally abstract actions, or macro-actions, in the solution of Markov decision processes. Unlike current mod­ els that combine both primitive actions and macro-actions and leave the state space un­ changed, we propose a hierarchical model (using an abstract MDP) that works with macro-actions only, and that significantly reduces the size of the state space. This is achieved by treating macro­ actions as local policies that act in certain regions of state space, and by restricting states in the ab­ stract MDP to those at the boundaries of regions. The abstract MDP approximates the original and can be solved more efficiently. We discuss sev­ eral ways in which macro-actions can be gen­ erated to ensure good solution quality. Finally, we consider ways in which macro-actions can be reused to solve multiple, related MDPs; and we show that this can justify the computational over­ head of macro-action generation.

Output: Hierarchical Solution of Markov Decision Processes using Macro-actions


Input: Consider Input: Multi Sentence Compression (MSC) is of great value to many real world applications, such as guided microblog summarization, opinion summarization and newswire summarization. Recently, word graph-based approaches have been proposed and become popular in MSC. Their key assumption is that redundancy among a set of related sentences provides a reliable way to generate informative and grammatical sentences. In this paper, we propose an effective approach to enhance the word graph-based MSC and tackle the issue that most of the state-of-the-art MSC approaches are confronted with: i.e., improving both informativity and grammaticality at the same time. Our approach consists of three main components: (1) a merging method based on Multiword Expressions (MWE); (2) a mapping strategy based on synonymy between words; (3) a re-ranking step to identify the best compression candidates generated using a POS-based language model (POS-LM). We demonstrate the effectiveness of this novel approach using a dataset made of clusters of English newswire sentences. The observed improvements on informativity and grammaticality of the generated compressions show that our approach is superior to state-of-the-art MSC methods.

Output: On Improving Informativity and Grammaticality for Multi-Sentence Compression


Input: Consider Input: We describe efforts towards getting better resources for EnglishArabic machine translation of spoken text. In particular, we look at movie subtitles as a unique, rich resource, as subtitles in one language often get translated into other languages. Movie subtitles are not new as a resource and have been explored in previous research; however, here we create a much larger bi-text (the biggest to date), and we further generate better quality alignment for it. Given the subtitles for the same movie in different languages, a key problem is how to align them at the fragment level. Typically, this is done using length-based alignment, but for movie subtitles, there is also time information. Here we exploit this information to develop an original algorithm that outperforms the current best subtitle alignment tool, subalign. The evaluation results show that adding our bi-text to the IWSLT training bi-text yields an improvement of over two BLEU points absolute.


Output: Bi-Text Alignment of Movie Subtitles for Spoken English-Arabic Statistical Machine Translation