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<Paper uid="P96-1054">
  <Title>Transitivity and Foregrounding in News Articles: experiments in information retrieval and automatic summarising</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="369" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
2 Definition of Transitivity
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Transitivity is usually considered to be a property of an entire clause (Hopper and Thompson, 1980). It is, broadly, the notion that an activity is transferred from an agent to a patient. It is therefore inherently linked with a clause containing two participants in which an action is highly effective.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The concept of transitivity has been defined in terms of the following parameters:  overall effectiveness or 'intensity' with which an action is transferred from one participant to another. A. There must be at least two participants for an action to be transferred.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> B. Transferable actions can be contrasted with nontransferable states, e.g. he pushed her; he thought about her.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> C. An action is either wholly or partially completed according to whether it is telic or atelic, e.g. I played the piano; I am playing the piano.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> D. Punctual actions have no transitional phase between start and end point, having a greater effect  The basic hypothesis of this study is that the degree of transitivity associated with a clause indicates the level of importance of a clause in a narrative text. For this assumption to form the basis of a practical implementation, transitivity must be objectively defined and the definition must be able to be processed automatically.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The notion of transitivity clearly has many implications for text processing, in particular information retrieval and automatic summarising, because it can be used to grade information in a document according to importance. In an information retrieval context, it means that a transitivity index could influence a decision about the relevance of a document to a query. In automatic summarising, it means that less important information could be sieved according to transitivity, leaving only the most important information to form the basis of a summary.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> News discourse was chosen because it is narrative based and therefore broadly applicable to the notion of transitivity. There has also been extensive research in the structural characteristics of this text type (Duszak, 1995) (Kay and Aylett, 1994) (Bell, 1991). However, the study poses a challenge in the sense that the notion of transitivity has previously been exemplified with relatively simple sentences presenting action sequences. A central question is how well the concept can be transferred to a domain which, although narrative based, diverges into commentary and analysis.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7">  on their patients, e.g. he kicked the door; he opened the door.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> E. An action is more effective if it is volitional, e.g. he bought the present; he forgot the present.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> F. An affirmative action has greater transitivity than a negative action, e.g. he called the boy; he didn't call the boy.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> G. An action which is realis (occurring in the real world) is more effective than an action which is irrealis (occurring in a non-real contingency world), e.g. they attacked the enemy; they might attack the enemy.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> H. Participants high in agency transfer an action more effectively than participants low in agency, e.g. he shocked me; the price shocked me.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> I. A patient is wholly or partially affected, e.g. I washed the dishes; I washed some of the dishes.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13"> J. Individuation refers to the distinctiveness of the object from the agent and of the object from its own background. The following properties contribute to the individuation of an object.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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