SummaryRank is a python package dedicated to supporting ranking experiments over sentence/summary data. It has implemented a range of basic functions, such as data imports, representations/features generation, and feature vectors split/join operations (for SVMLight format), to make ranking experiments easy.

This package supports the following sets of features:

• Query-biased summarization features from Metzler and Kanungo (2008)
• ESA and Word2Vec features from Chen et al. (2015)
• TAGME feature and context meta-features from Yang et al. (2016)

If you use this package in your research work, please cite the following paper:

@inproceedings{yang_beyond_2016,
 author = {Yang, Liu and Ai, Qingyao and Spina, Damiano and Chen, Ruey-Cheng and
           Pang, Liang and Croft, W. Bruce and Guo, Jiafeng and Scholer, Falk},
 title = {Beyond Factoid {QA}: Effective Methods for Non-factoid Answer Sentence Retrieval},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of {ECIR} '16},
 year = {2016},
 pages = {115--128},
 publisher = {Springer}
}

To install all dependencies:

pip install -r SummaryRank/requirements
python -m nltk.downloader wordnet

To run the main script:

SummaryRank/run.py <command>

SummaryRank will print out a list of supported tools if no command is specified.

• An simple example script for extracting Metzler-Kanungo features is given in the directory examples/.

• We used two Galago indexes, one built over Gov2 as the background model and the other over English Wikipedia for computing ESA.

  To build these indexes, you simply do (replace galago with the true Galago executable):

  galago --indexPath=/path/to/index --inputPath+/path/to/trectext --stemmer+krovetz --stemmer+porter
  

• Originally we used the English Wikipedia dump exported on May 15, 2015, but any later version should also work.

• The gen_freqstats tool basically produces a freqstats.gz file, in which each line is of the form:

  <term> <term_frequency> <document_frequency>
  

  So one can essentially build this file from any custom resources.

  Note that the first line records collection level information. We put total number of terms in the field term frequency and total number of docs in document_frequency. Put any string as term as it is ignored in this case.

• The gen_freqstats tool can take an Indri index as input.

SummaryRank put all processed data in a model directory (called model), so upon the first execution, basic data will need to be imported.

Some import tools are available for these collections, which can be launched as commands:

• The WebAP Dataset from CIIR/UMass (import_webap)
• TREC Novelty Track Data (import_trec_novelty)
• MobileClick-2 (import_mobileclick)

One may need to specify a model directory using argument -m and supply a list of raw files distributed with the benchmark.

To import WebAP data, for example, you can just do (replace WebAP files with true paths):

SummaryRank/run.py import_webap -m webap WebAP/gradedText/gov2.query.json WebAP/gradedText/grade.trectext_patched

Certain tools such as gen_freqstats and gen_esa take Galago indexes as input.

Following the import, some of the intermediate data other than the raw texts (called representations) may need to be generated. These representations serve as the input of downstream feature extractors. This additional step incorporates external resources or the output of external tools into the pipeline.

Currently, these representations are available:

• terms and stems (gen_term)
• term frequency stats (gen_freqstats)
• ESA representation (gen_esa)
• TAGME representation (gen_tagme)

To generate terms/stems (with both porter/krovetz stemmer supports):

SummaryRank/run.py gen_term -m webap --stemmer krovetz

To generate term frequencies, which are required by retrieval function features such as LanguageModelScore and BM25Score:

SummaryRank/run.py gen_freqstats -m webap /path/to/index postings.krovetz

Note that the frequencies are pulled from a Galago inverted index, so one needs to specify the index part (usually postings.krovetz or posting.porter).

To generate the ESA representation, with vector size (-k) and a Galago inverted index over the Wikipedia data as input:

SummaryRank/run.py gen_esa -m webap /path/to/index

To generate the TAGME representation, with the API key to the TAGME web service as input:

SummaryRank/run.py gen_tagme -m webap YOURAPIKEY

SummaryRank currently has the following features built in:

• SentenceLength
• SentenceLocation
• ExactMatch
• TermOverlap
• SynonymOverlap
• LanguageModelScore
• BM25Score
• ESACosineSimilarity
• Word2VecSimilarity
• TagmeOverlap

All the feature extraction has to go through the extract tool. The tool takes a list of feature classnames as input, execute each of the nominated extractors, and print out the produced feature vectors. The output is in the SVMLight format, and is usually stored in a gzip'ed format.

For example, the following command will extract the SentenceLength and TermOverlap features from the WebAP data and store the compressed output to some file.

SummaryRank/run.py extract -m webap SentenceLength TermOverlap | gzip > two_features.txt.gz

Abbreviations to commonly used feature sets such as MKFeatureSet were also available to save the user some typing. For example, the following command will extract all 6 Metzler-Kanungo features:

SummaryRank/run.py extract -m webap MKFeatureSet | gzip > mk.txt.gz

Certain features may come with mandatory feature-related options. This can be revealed in the help screen at the very bottom ("dynamically generated") when the classnames are given.

SummaryRank/run.py extract MKFeatureSet -h

A special tool contextualize implements the extration of the context features proposed in Yang et al. It takes a feature file (and optionally a list of selected fields via -f) as input. For example, this will contextualize the features 1, 4, 5, and 6 in the vector file mk.txt.gz.

SummaryRank/run.py contextualize -f 1,4-6 mk.txt.gz

SummaryRank also implements a set of data manipulation tools:

SummaryRank prepends a list of feature names as comments at the very beginning of the feature-vector output (called preamble). The describe tool can be used to pull out this info.

SummaryRank/run.py describe mk.txt.gz

The cut tool is used to extract certain fields (e.g., features) from the vector file, resembling the function of the unix tool cut. It takes the vector file as input, and the field list is given via argument -f. When the argument --renumbering is specified, the feature IDs will be renumbered starting from 1. For example, the following will single out the features 2, 3, 5.

SummaryRank/run.py cut mk.txt.gz -f2,3,5 | gzip > mk_primes.txt.gz

The join tool takes two or more vector files and merge them into one set. Some of the feature will be renumbered.

SummaryRank/run.py join mk_123.txt.gz mk_456.txt.gz | gzip > mk_full.txt.gz

The shuffle tool creates random shuffle over query topics, usually used together with split. A random seed can be specified through argument -seed.

SummaryRank/run.py shuffle mk.txt.gz | gzip > mk_shuffle.txt.gz

The split tool will split the data into multiple folds (via -k).

SummaryRank/run.py split -k 5 mk.txt.gz

The normalize tool is used to normalize features values.

SummaryRank/run.py normalize mk.txt.gz | gzip > mk_normalized.txt.gz

• Ruey-Cheng Chen
• Damiano Spina
• Liu Yang
• Qingyao Ai

Ruey-Cheng Chen, Damiano Spina, W. Bruce Croft, Mark Sanderson, and Falk Scholer. Harnessing semantics for answer sentence retrieval. In Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval, ESAIR '15 (CIKM workshop), pages 21–27. ACM, 2015.

Donald Metzler and Tapas Kanungo. Machine Learned Sentence Selection Strategies for Query-Biased Summarization. In Proceedings of SIGIR 2008 Learning to Rank Workshop, pages 40–47. ACM, 2008.

Liu Yang, Qingyao Ai, Damiano Spina, Ruey-Cheng Chen, Liang Pang, W. Bruce Croft, Jiafeng Guo and Falk Scholer. Beyond factoid QA: Effective methods for non-factoid answer sentence retrieval. In Proceedings of ECIR '16, pages 115–128. Springer, 2016.

Evi Yulianti, Ruey-Cheng Chen, Falk Scholer, and Mark Sanderson. Using Semantic and Context Features for Answer Summary Extraction. In Proceedings of ADCS '16, pages 81-84. ACM, 2016.