Multilingual Wikipedia, Summarization, and Information Trustworthiness

Wikipedia is used as a corpus for a variety of text processing applications. It is especially popular for information selection tasks, such as summarization feature identification, answer generation/verification, etc. Many Wikipedia entries (about people, events, locations, etc.) have descriptions in several languages. Often Wikipedia entry descriptions created in different languages exhibit differences in length and content. In this paper we show that the pattern of information overlap across the descriptions written in different languages for the same Wikipedia entry fits well the pyramid summary framework, i.e., some information facts are covered in the Wikipedia entry descriptions in many languages, while others are covered in a handful number of descriptions. This phenomenon leads to a natural summarization algorithm which we present in this paper. According to our evaluation, the generated summaries have a high level of user satisfaction. Moreover, the discovered pyramid structure of Wikipedia entry descriptions can be used for Wikipedia information trustworthiness verification.