TEXT SUMMARIZATION USING LEXICAL COHESION: APPROACHES AND EVALUATIONS

Abstract

Popularity of the Internet has contributed towards the explosive growth of online information, and it is especially useful to have tools which can help users digest information content. Text summarization addresses this need by taking a source text, selecting the most important portions of it, and presenting coherent summary to the user in a manner sensitive to the user's or application's needs. The goal of this paper is to show how these objectives can be achieved through an efficient use of lexical cohesion. The current work addresses both generic and query-based summaries in the context of single documents and sets of documents as in current news. We present an approach for identifying the most important portions of the text which are topically best suited to represent the source texts according to the author's views or in response to the user's interests. This identification must also take into consideration the degree of connectiveness among the chosen text portions so as to minimize the danger of producing summaries which contain poorly linked sentences. We present a system that handles these objectives, discuss its performance, and evaluate it and compare it to other systems in the context of Document Understanding Conference (DUC) evaluations.