Extractive Snippet Generation for Arguments

Abstract

Snippets are used in web search to help users assess the relevance of retrieved results to their query. Recently, specialized search engines have arisen that retrieve pro and con arguments on controversial issues. We argue that standard snippet generation is insufficient to represent the core reasoning of an argument. In this paper, we introduce the task of generating a snippet that represents the main claim and reason of an argument. We propose a query-independent extractive summarization approach to this task that uses a variant of PageRank to assess the importance of sentences based on their context and argumentativeness. In both automatic and manual evaluation, our approach outperforms strong baselines.