Shallow semantics for topic-oriented multi-document automatic text summarization

There are presently a number of NLP tools available which can provide semantic information about a sentence. Connexor Machinese Semantics is one of the most elaborate of such tools in terms of the information it provides. It has been hypothesized that semantic analysis of sentences is required in order to make significant improvements in automatic summarization. Elaborate semantic analysis is still not particularly feasible. In this thesis, I will look at what shallow semantic features are available from an off the shelf semantic analysis tool which might improve the responsiveness of a summary. The aim of this work is to use the information made available as an intermediary approach to improving the responsiveness of summaries. While this approach is not likely to perform as well as full semantic analysis, it is considerably easier to achieve and could provide an important stepping stone in the direction of deeper semantic analysis. As a significant portion of this task we develop mechanisms in various programming languages to view, process, and extract relevant information and features from the data.