Arabic/English Multi-document Summarization with CLASSY - The Past and the Future

Automatic document summarization has become increasingly important due to the quantity of written material generated worldwide. Generating good quality summaries enables users to cope with larger amounts of information. English-document summarization is a difficult task. Yet it is not sufficient. Environmental, economic, and other global issues make it imperative for English speakers to understand how other countries and cultures perceive and react to important events. CLASSY (Clustering, Linguistics, And Statistics for Summarization Yield) is an automatic, extract-generating, summarization system that uses linguistic trimming and statistical methods to generate generic or topic(/query)-driven summaries for single documents or clusters of documents. CLASSY has performed well in the Document Understanding Conference (DUC) evaluations and the Multi-lingual (Arabic/English) Summarization Evaluations (MSE). We present a description of CLASSY. We follow this with experiments and results from the MSE evaluations and conclude with a discussion of on-going work to improve the quality of the summaries–both Englishonly and multi-lingual–that CLASSY generates.