Automatic Text Summarization Using a Machine Learning Approach

In this paper we address the automatic summarization task. Recent research works on extractive-summary generation employ some heuristics, but few works indicate how to select the relevant features. We will present a summarization procedure based on the application of trainable Machine Learning algorithms which employs a set of features extracted directly from the original text. These features are of two kinds: statistical – based on the frequency of some elements in the text; and linguistic – extracted from a simplified argumentative structure of the text. We also present some computational results obtained with the application of our summarizer to some well known text databases, and we compare these results to some baseline summarization procedures.