This paper describes Artex, another algorithm for Automatic Text Summarization. In order to rank sentences, a simple inner product is calculated between each sentence, a document vector (text topic) and a lexical vector (vocabulary used by a sentence). Summaries are then generated by assembling the highest ranked sentences. No ruled-based linguistic post-processing is necessary in order to obtain summaries. Tests over several datasets (coming from Document Understanding Conferences (DUC), Text Analysis Conferences (TAC), evaluation campaigns, etc.) in French, English and Spanish have shown that summarizer achieves interesting results.
In Automatic Text Summarization, preprocessing is an important phase to reduce the space of textual representation. Classically, stemming and lemmatization have been widely used for normalizing words. However, even using normalization on large texts, the curse of dimensionality can disturb the performance of summarizers. This paper describes a new method for normalization of words to further reduce the space of representation. We propose to reduce each word to its initial letters, as a form of Ultra-stemming. The results show that Ultra-stemming not only preserve the content of summaries produced by this representation, but often the performances of the systems can be dramatically improved. Summaries on trilingual corpora were evaluated automatically with Fresa. Results confirm an increase in the performance, regardless of summarizer system used.