Ranking Explanatory Sentences For Opinion Summarization

We introduce a novel sentence ranking problem called explanatory sentence extraction (ESE) which aims to rank sentences in opinionated text based on their usefulness for helping users understand the detailed reasons of sentiments (i.e., "explanatoriness"). We propose and study several general methods for scoring the explanatoriness of a sentence. We create new data sets and propose a new measure for evaluation. Experiment results show that the proposed methods are effective, outperforming a state of the art sentence ranking method for standard text summarization.