PRODUCTION RULE SYSTEM FOR MESSAGE SUMMARIZATION.

In summarizing a message, it is necessary to access knowledge about linguistic relations, subject matter knowledge about the domain of discourse, and knowledge about the user's goals for the summary. This paper investigates the feasibility of integrating these knowledge sources by using computational linguistic and expert system techniques to generate one-line summaries from the narrative content. This approach, called information formatting, uses an explicit grammar of English and a classification of the semantic relationships within the domain to derive a tabular representation of the information in a message narrative. A production system, written in OPS5, then interprets the information in the table and automatically generates a summary line.