Automatic summarization as means of simplifying texts, an evaluation for Swedish

We have developed an extraction based summarizer based on a word space model and PageRank and compared the readability of the resulting summaries with the original text, using various measures for Swedish and texts from different genres. The measures include among others readability index (LIX), nominal ratio (NR) and word variation index (OVIX). The measures correspond to the vocabulary load, idea density, human interest and sentence structure of the text and can be used to indicate the difficulty a reader might have in processing the text. The results show that the summarized texts are more readable, indicating that summarization can be used to reduce the effort to read a text.