Salience-based content characterisation of text documents

Traditionally, the document summarisation task has been tackled either as a natural language processing problem, with an instantiated meaning template being rendered into coherent prose, or as a passage extraction problem, where certain fragments (typically sentences) of the source document are deemed to be highly representative of its content, and thus delivered as meaningful ``approximations'' of it. Balancing the conflicting requirements of depth and accuracy of a summary, on the one hand, and document and domain independence, on the other, has proven a very hard problem. This paper describes a novel approach to content characterisation of text documents. It is domain- and genre-independent, by virtue of not requiring an in-depth analysis of the full meaning. At the same time, it remains closer to the core meaning by choosing a different granularity of its representations (phrasal expressions rather than sentences or paragraphs), by exploiting a notion of discourse contiguity and coherence for the purposes of uniform coverage and context maintenance, and by utilising a strong linguistic notion of salience, as a more appropriate and representative measure of a document's ``aboutness''.