Summarizing Short Texts Through a Discourse-Centered Approach in a Multilingual Context

The chapter presents the architecture of a system targeting summaries of short texts in six languages. At the core of a summary, which is comprised of clauses and sentences extracted from the original text, is the structure of the discourse and its relationship with its coreferential links. The approach shows a uniform design for all languages, while language specificity is attributed to the resources that fuel the component modules. The design described here includes a number of feedback loops used to fine-tune the parameters by comparing the output of the modules against annotated corpora. “Average ” summaries over some human-produced ones are used to evaluate the accuracy of each of the monolingual systems. The study also presents some quantitative data on the corpora used, showing a comparison among languages and results that, mostly, prove to be above the state-of-the-art.