Automatic text summarization based on lexical chains

Abstract

The method of lexical chains is the first time introduced to generate summaries from Chinese texts. The algorithm which computes lexical chains based on the HowNet knowledge database is modified to improve the performance and suit Chinese summarization. Moreover, the construction rules of lexical chains are extended, and relationship among more lexical items is used. The algorithm constructs lexical chains first, and then strong chains are identified and significant sentences are extracted from the text to generate the summary. Evaluation results show that the performance of the system has a notable improvement both in precision and recall compared to the original system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.