Determining and ranking the most salient entities in a text is critical for user-facing systems, especially as users increasingly rely on models to interpret long documents they only partially read. Graded entity salience addresses this need by assigning entities scores that reflect their relative importance in a text. Existing approaches fall into two main categories: subjective judgments of salience, which allow for gradient scoring but lack consistency, and summarization-based methods, which define salience as mention-worthiness in a summary, promoting explainability but limiting outputs to binary labels (entities are either summary-worthy or not). In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for graded entity salience that combines the strengths of both approaches. Using an English dataset spanning 12 spoken and written genres, we collect 5 summaries per document and calculate each entity’s salience score based on its presence across these summaries. Our approach shows stronger correlation with scores based on human summaries and alignments, and outperforms existing techniques, including LLMs. We release our data and code at https://github.com/jl908069/gum_sum_salience to support further research on graded salient entity extraction.

As NLP models become increasingly capable of understanding documents in terms of coherent entities rather than strings, obtaining the most salient entities for each document is not only an important end task in itself but also vital for Information Retrieval (IR) and other downstream applications such as controllable summarization. In this paper, we present and evaluate GUMsley, the first entity salience dataset covering all named and non-named salient entities for 12 genres of English text, aligned with entity types, Wikification links and full coreference resolution annotations. We promote a strict definition of salience using human summaries and demonstrate high inter-annotator agreement for salience based on whether a source entity is mentioned in the summary. Our evaluation shows poor performance by pre-trained SOTA summarization models and zero-shot LLM prompting in capturing salient entities in generated summaries. We also show that predicting or providing salient entities to several model architectures enhances performance and helps derive higher-quality summaries by alleviating the entity hallucination problem in existing abstractive summarization.

Work on shallow discourse parsing in English has focused on the Wall Street Journal corpus, the only large-scale dataset for the language in the PDTB framework. However, the data is not openly available, is restricted to the news domain, and is by now 35 years old. In this paper, we present and evaluate a new open-access, multi-genre benchmark for PDTB-style shallow discourse parsing, based on the existing UD English GUM corpus, for which discourse relation annotations in other frameworks already exist. In a series of experiments on cross-domain relation classification, we show that while our dataset is compatible with PDTB, substantial out-of-domain degradation is observed, which can be alleviated by joint training on both datasets.