A Token-wise CNN-based Method for Sentence Compression

Abstract

Sentence compression is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) task aimed at shortening original sentences and preserving their key information. Its applications can benefit many fields e.g. one can build tools for language education. However, current methods are largely based on Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models which suffer from poor processing speed. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a token-wise Convolutional Neural Network, a CNN-based model along with pre-trained Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) features for deletion-based sentence compression. We also compare our model with RNN-based models and fine-tuned BERT. Although one of the RNN-based models outperforms marginally other models given the same input, our CNN-based model was ten times faster than the RNN-based approach.