Towards multi-lingual summarization: A comparative analysis of sentence extraction methods on English and Hebrew corpora

The trend toward the growing multilinguality of the Internet requires text summarization techniques that work equally well in multiple languages. Only some of the automated summarization methods proposed in the literature, however, can be defined as “languageindependent”, as they are not based on any morphological analysis of the summarized text. In this paper, we perform an in-depth comparative analysis of language-independent sentence scoring methods for extractive single-document summarization. We evaluate 15 published summarization methods proposed in the literature and 16 methods introduced in (Litvak et al., 2010). The evaluation is performed on English and Hebrew corpora. The results suggest that the performance ranking of the compared methods is quite similar in both languages. The top ten bilingual scoring methods include six methods introduced in (Litvak et al., 2010).