Described here is an automatic text summarization system for Japanese newspaper articles on sassho-jiken (murders and bodily harms). We extract the pieces of information from a text, inter-connect them to represent the scenes and participants involved in the sassho-jiken, and finally produce a summary by generating sentences from the information extracted. An experiment and its evaluation show that, while a limitation being imposed on the domain, our method works well in depicting important information from the newspaper articles and the summaries produced are better in adequacy and readability than those obtained by extracting sentences.

Naturalness of expressions reflects various pragmatic factors in addition to grammatical factors. In this paper, we discuss relations between expressions and two pragmatic factors: a point fo view of speaker and a hierarchical relation among participants. Degree of empathy" and class" is used to express these pragmatic factors as one-dimensional notion. Then inequalities and equalities of them become conditions for selecting natural expressions. The authors of this paper formulate conditions as principles about lexical and syntactical constraints, and have implemented a sentence generation grammar using the unification grammar formalism.