Finding the Best Approach for Multi-lingual Text Summarisation: A Comparative Analysis

This paper addresses the problem of multilingual text summarisation. The goal is to analyse three approaches for generating summaries in four languages (English, Spanish, German and French), in order to determine the best one to adopt when tackling this issue. The proposed approaches rely on: i) language-independent techniques; ii) language-specific resources; and iii) machine translation resources applied to a mono-lingual summariser. The evaluation carried out employing the JRC corpus – a corpus specifically created for multi-lingual summarisation – shows that the approach which uses languagespecific resources is the most appropriate in our comparison framework, performing better than state-of-the-art multi-lingual summarisers. Moreover, the readability assessment conducted over the resulting summaries for this approach proves that they are also very competitive with respect to their quality.