A Workbench for Rapid Generation of Cross-Lingual Summaries

The need for cross-lingual information access is more than ever with the easy accessibility to the Internet, especially in vastly multilingual societies like India. Cross-lingual summarization can help minimize human effort needed for achieving publishable articles in multiple languages, while making the most important information available in target language in the form of summaries. We describe a flexible, web-based tool for human editing of cross-lingual summaries to rapidly generate publishable summaries in a number of Indian Languages for news articles originally published in English, and simultaneously collect detailed logs about the process, at both article and sentence level. Similar to translation post-editing logs, such logs can be used to evaluate the automated cross-lingual summaries, in terms of effort needed to make them publishable. The generated summaries along with the logs can be used to train and improve the automatic system over time.