A B L IT : A Resource for Analyzing and Generating Abridged Versions of English Literature

Creating an abridged version of a text involves 001 shortening it while maintaining its linguistic 002 qualities. In this paper, we examine this task 003 from an NLP perspective for the first time. We 004 present a new resource, A B L IT , which is de- 005 rived from abridged versions of English litera- 006 ture books. The dataset captures passage-level 007 alignments between the original and abridged 008 texts. We characterize the linguistic relations of 009 these alignments, and create automated models 010 to predict these relations as well as to gener- 011 ate abridgements for new texts. Our findings 012 establish abridgement as a challenging task, 013 motivating future resources and research. 014