This annotation experiment is concerned with sentence compression. You will be presented with a selection of newspaper articles. Your task is to read each sentence in the article and compress it so as to produce a shorter version. The compressed sentence should be grammatical and retain the most important information of the original sentence.
In producing compressions, you are free to delete words, add new words, substitute them or reorder them. While doing the task you will find that word deletion is the most frequent compression operation. You should use substitution, insertion, and reordering operations only if they render the original sentence shorter. In other words, we are only interested in rewriting operations that reduce the original sentence. Simply paraphrasing the original without reducing its length will not yield appropriate compressions.
There are several rewrite operations you may wish to apply in order to render the original sentence shorter. For instance you may delete appositions or parentheticals, relative clauses, or you may rewrite a passive verb as an active one. In other cases you may choose to substitute two or more words with a shorter word or phrase that conveys a similar meaning. You can find a list of examples illustrating a variety of rewrite operations here. We recommend that you study these examples before embarking on the annotation.
Although there is a certain degree of flexibility in creating compressions, you should not rewrite a sentence as two or more sentences. In other words you should produce one sentence (possibly with a main and subordinate clauses) but not multi-sentence output (e.g., a discourse).
A small number of sentences will be very short or will contain no information and thus will not be amenable to compression. When you come across such a sentence you should not perform any rewriting operations. The original and compressed sentence are identical in this case.
The annotation will proceed on a document-by-document basis. In compressing individual sentences you should ensure that the resulting (compressed) document is coherent. This will be relatively easy to enforce and in most cases will come naturally with your compressions.
There are no correct answers to this task. All compressions produced are considered valid provided they have been made while considering:
The interface will present you with a selection of documents to choose from. Once you are done with your annotation, please hit the "submit" button and your compressions will be automatically saved. It is also possible to view and revise your compressions, simply go to the Document Selector, choose the document you wish to change and hit the reload button.
Once you load a document, you will then be asked for your name and email address; these are used for tracking purposes and will not be passed onto any third party.
Each sentence will be followed by a Compressed Sentence box for writing down its corresponding compression. If the sentence cannot be compressed, then please copy the original sentence verbatim in the Compressed Sentence box. The interface is illustrated below.
| Sergei , who is a licensed surgeon , now practices healing of the spirit , his only instruments his hands and a bent wire that measures human energy fields for curses that cause illness and depression . |
| Sergei practices healing of the spirit with his hands and a wire measuring energy fields causing illness and depression . |
Before starting the annotation task make sure to study some examples of compressed sentences. In addition to the individual example sentences mentioned above, we have also provided you with a fully compressed document. Please read it to get an idea of how your compressions should look like.
If you have any questions or comments regarding this experiment please contact us.