Sentence Ranking with the Semantic Link Network in Scientific Paper

Sentence ranking is one of the most important research issues in text analysis. It can be used in text summarization and information retrieval. Graph-based methods are a common way of ranking and extracting sentences. In graph based methods, sentences are nodes of graph and edges are built based on the sentence similarities or on sentence co-occurrence relationship. PageRank style algorithms can be applied to get sentence ranks. In this paper, we focus on how to rank sentences in a single scientific paper. A scientific literature has more structural information than general texts and this structural information has not been fully explored yet in graph based ranking models. We investigated several different methods that used the is-part-of link on paragraph and section and similar link and co-occurrence link to construct a heterogeneous graph for ranking sentences. We conducted experiments on these methods to compare the results on sentence ranking. It shows that structural information can help identify more representative sentences.