Search applications often display shortened sentences which must contain certain query terms and must fit within the space constraints of a user interface. This work introduces a new transition-based sentence compression technique developed for such settings. Our query-focused method constructs length and lexically constrained compressions in linear time, by growing a subgraph in the dependency parse of a sentence. This theoretically efficient approach achieves an 11X empirical speedup over baseline ILP methods, while better reconstructing gold constrained shortenings. Such speedups help query-focused applications, because users are measurably hindered by interface lags. Additionally, our technique does not require an ILP solver or a GPU.
@article{arxiv.1904.09051,
title = {Query-focused Sentence Compression in Linear Time},
author = {Abram Handler and Brendan O'Connor},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.09051},
year = {2019}
}