Raytheon BBN Technologies

Headline Generation is the process of automatically creating a short sentence-length summary for a broadcast news story. At Raytheon BBN Technologies, we have developed a process, called Topiary that combines two different approaches. The first approach starts by finding a sentence that seems to contain the main ideas of the story. The sentence is automatically shortened by removing less important subordinate clauses. Because this shortened sentence may lack context, we also include a second approach in which the OnTopic system is used to find one or more topics for the whole story. The final resulting headline contains both the broad context of the story and a specific informative sentence saying what happened in the story.

This technique has been shown to work on English news stories, as well as stories translated automatically from other languages, including Cebuano, Hindi, and Arabic.