How much can Syntax help Sentence Compression ?

Sentence compression involves selecting key information present in the input and rewriting this information into a short, coherent text. Using the Gigaword corpus, we provide a detailed investigation of how syntax can help guide both extractive and abstractive sentence compression. We explore different ways of selecting subtrees from the dependency structure of the input sentence; compare the results of various models and show that preselecting information based on syntax yields promising results.