Comparative Analysis of Automated Text Summarization Techniques: The Case of Ethiopian Languages

Abstract

Nowadays, there is an abundance of information available from both online and offline sources. For a single topic, we can get more than hundreds of sources containing a wealth of information. The ability to extract or generate a summary of popular content allows users to quickly search for content and obtain preliminary data in the shortest amount of time. Manually extracting useful information from them is a difficult task. Automatic text summarization (ATS) systems are being developed to address this issue. Text summarization is the process of extracting useful information from large documents and compressing it into a summary while retaining all the relevant contents. This review paper provides a broad overview of ATS research works in various Ethiopian languages such as Amharic, Afan Oromo, and Tigrinya using different text summarization approaches. The work has identified the novel and recommended state-of-the-art techniques and methods for future researchers in the area and provides knowledge and useful support to new researchers in this field by providing a concise overview of the various feature extraction methods and classification techniques required for different types of ATS approaches applied to the Ethiopian languages. Finally, different recommendations for future researchers have been forwarded.