Query-focused Sentence Compression in Linear Time

Search applications often display shortened sentences which must contain certain query terms and must fit within the space constraints of a user interface. This work introduces a new transition-based sentence compression technique developed for such settings. Our method constructs length and lexically constrained compressions in linear time, by growing a subgraph in the dependency parse of a sentence. This approach achieves a 4x speed up over baseline ILP compression techniques, and better reconstructs gold shortenings under constraints. Such efficiency gains permit constrained compression of multiple sentences, without unreasonable lag.