A Keyphrase-Based Approach to Text Summarization for English and Bengali Documents

Abstract

With the rapid growth of the World Wide Web, information overload is becoming a problem for an increasingly large number of people. Since summarization helps human to digest the main contents of a text document very rapidly, there is a need for an effective and powerful tool that can automatically summarize text. In this paper, we present a keyphrase based approach to single document summarization that extracts first a set of keyphrases from a document, use the extracted keyphrases to choose sentences from the document and finally form an extractive summary with the chosen sentences. We view keyphrases (single or multi-word) as the important concepts and we assume that an extractive summary of a document is an elaboration of the important concepts contained in the document to some permissible extent and it is controlled by the given summary length. We have tested our proposed keyphrase-based summarization approach on two different datasets: one for English and another for Bengali. The experimental results show that the performance of the proposed system is comparable to some state-of-the art summarization systems.