Single extractive text summarization based on a genetic algorithm

Abstract

Extractive text summarization consists in selecting the most important units (normally sentences) from the original text, but it must be done as closer as humans do. Several interesting automatic approaches are proposed for this task, but some of them are focused on getting a better result rather than giving some assumptions about what humans use when producing a summary. In this research, not only the competitive results are obtained but also some assumptions are given about what humans tried to represent in a summary. To reach this objective a genetic algorithm is proposed with special emphasis on the fitness function which permits to contribute with some conclusions. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.