The paper describes our participation in the Guided and Multilingual Summarization Tasks at the Text Analysis Conference 2011 (TAC’11). We participated in the Guided task with the system from the previous year which combines aspect identification by an event extraction system and automatically learned lexicons with LSA-based summarizer. This year we included temporal analysis to improve sentence ordering, detection of update information and dealing with the WHEN aspect. We made a first try to compress and paraphrase sentences with our second run. Multilingual summarization is our ultimate goal and thus all components of the system are either fully language independent or can be relatively easily adapted for other languages. The multilingual task provided a possibility to test the system on other languages then English. The sentence-extractive summarizer was ranked among the top systems in the case of readability and non-redundancy. Even if the content of its summaries was not ranked on the top for English in the main Guided task, it reached the top results in the Multilingual task. The generative run suffered from worse readability which affected also the content scores.
['Josef Steinberger', 'Mijail A. Kabadjov', 'Ralf Steinberger', 'Hristo Tanev', 'Marco Turchi', 'Vanni Zavarella']
JRC's Participation at TAC 2011: Guided and Multilingual Summarization Tasks