Automatic Text Summarization based on Rhetorical Structure Theory

In this paper, we present an automatic text summarization method based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). The first part gives a general introduction to the Rhetorical Structure Theory. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is an analytic framework designed to account for text structure in text at the clause level. The system extracts the rhetorical structure of text and the compound of the rhetorical relations between sentences, and then cuts out less important parts from the extracted structure. Finally it uses the natural language generation method based on model to produce an exact and fluent summarization. The summarization generated in this way shows its effectiveness and high quality.