We present a new summarisation task, taking scientific articles and producing journal table-of-contents entries in the chemistry domain. These are one- or two-sentence author-written summaries that present the key findings of a paper. This is a first look at this summarisation task with an open access publication corpus consisting of titles and abstracts, as input texts, and short author-written advertising blurbs, as the ground truth. We introduce the dataset and evaluate it with state-of-the-art summarisation methods.

Distributional semantic models have been effective at representing linguistic semantics at the word level, and more recently research has moved on to the construction of distributional representations for larger segments of text. However, it is not well understood how the composition operators that work well on short phrase-based models scale up to full-length sentences. In this paper we test several simple compositional methods on a sentence-length similarity task and discover that their performance peaks at fewer than ten operations. We also introduce a novel sentence segmentation method that reduces the number of compositional operations.

In recent years, following the rapid development in the Semantic Web and Knowledge Management research, ontologies have become more in demand in Natural Language Processing. An increasing number of systems use ontologies either internally, for modelling the domain of the application, or as data structures that hold the output resulting from the work of the system, in the form of knowledge bases. While there are many ontology editing tools aimed at expert users, there are very few which are accessible to users wishing to create simple structures without delving into the intricacies of knowledge representation languages. The approach described in this paper allows users to create and edit ontologies simply by using a restricted version of the English language. The controlled language described within is based on an open vocabulary and a restricted set of grammatical constructs. Sentences written in this language unambiguously map into a number of knowledge representation formats including OWL and RDF-S to allow round-trip ontology management.