Multilingual Natural Language Processing Applications: From Theory to Practice

Chapter 12. Multilingual Automatic Summarization

Frank Schilder and Liang Zhou

12.1. Introduction

Automatic summarization has been a very active field within computational linguistics, and researchers have looked at this problem from various angles. In the past, the focus has been on texts written in a single source language. However, in recent years multilingual summarization has been generating a lot of interest where texts written in multiple languages are used by summarization systems.

We can distinguish between single- and multidocument summarization. A summary can be driven by a specific query or provide a general summary of the document (or document collection). The summary itself can have different purposes. An informative summary, for ...