Human Judgement as a Basis for Evaluation of Discourse-Connective-Based Full-Text Abstraction in Chinese

In Chinese text, discourse connectives constitute a major linguistic device available for a writer to explicitly indicate the structure of a discourse. This set of discourse connectives, consisting of a few hundred entries in modern Chinese, is relatively stable and domain independent. In a recently published paper [T’sou 1996], a computational procedure was introduced to generate the abstract of an input text using mainly the discourse connectives appearing in the text. This paper attempts to demonstrate the validity of this approach to full-text abstraction by means of an evaluation method, which compares human efforts in text abstraction with the performance of an experimental system called ACFAS. Specifically, our concern is about the relationship between the perceived importance of each individual sentence as judged by human beings and the sentences containing discourse connectives within an argumentative discourse.