We consider the problem of modeling the content structure of texts within a specific domain, in terms of the topics the texts address and the order in which these topics appear. We first present an effective knowledge-lean method for learning content models from unannotated documents, utilizing a novel adaptation of algorithms for Hidden Markov Models. We then apply our method to two complementary tasks: information ordering and extractive summarization. Our experiments show that incorporating content models in these applications yields substantial improvement over previously-proposedmethods.

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Source code