An abstractive Arabic text summarizer with user controlled granularity

Automated summaries help tackle the ever growing volume of information floating around. There are two broad categories: extract and abstract. In the former we retain the more important sentences more or less in their original structure, while the latter requires a fusion of multiple sentences and/or paraphrasing. This is a more challenging task than extract summaries. In this paper, we present a novel generic abstract summarizer for a single document in Arabic language. The system starts by segmenting the input text topic wise. Then, each textual segment is extractively summarized. Finally, we apply rule-based sentence reduction technique. The RST-based extractive summarizer is an enhanced version of the system in Azmi and Al-Thanyyan (2012). By controlling the size of the extract summary of each segment we can cap the size of the final abstractive summary. Both summarizers, the enhanced extractive and the abstractive, were evaluated. We tested our enhanced extractive summarizer on the same dataset in the aforementioned paper, using the measures recall, precision and ROUGE. The results show noticeable improvement in the performance, specially the precision in shorter summaries. The abstractive summarizer was tested on a set of 150 documents, generating summaries of sizes 50%, 40%, 30% and 20% (of the original's word count). The results were assessed by two human experts who graded them out of a maximum score of 5. The average score ranged between 4.53 and 1.92 for summaries at different granularities, with shorter summaries receiving the lower score. The experimental results are encouraging and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.