DTATG: An Automatic Title Generator based on Dependency Trees

We study automatic title generation for a given block of text and present a method called DTATG to generate titles. DTATG first extracts a small number of central sentences that convey the main meanings of the text and are in a suitable structure for conversion into a title. DTATG then constructs a dependency tree for each of these sentences and removes certain branches using a Dependency Tree Compression Model we devise. We also devise a title test to determine if a sentence can be used as a title. If a trimmed sentence passes the title test, then it becomes a title candidate. DTATG selects the title candidate with the highest ranking score as the final title. Our experiments showed that DTATG can generate adequate titles. We also showed that DTATG-generated titles have higher F1 scores than those generated by the previous methods.