A Hybrid Approach for Arabic Text Summarization Using Domain Knowledge and Genetic Algorithms

Text summarization is the process of producing a shorter version of a specific text. Automatic summarization techniques have been applied to various domains such as medical, political, news, and legal domains proving that adapting domain-relevant features could improve the summarization performance. Despite the existence of plenty of research work in the domain-based summarization in English and other languages, there is a lack of such work in Arabic due to the shortage of existing knowledge bases. In this paper, a hybrid, single-document text summarization approach (abbreviated as (ASDKGA)) is presented. The approach incorporates domain knowledge, statistical features, and genetic algorithms to extract important points of Arabic political documents. The ASDKGA approach is tested on two corpora KALIMAT corpus and Essex Arabic Summaries Corpus (EASC). The Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE) framework was used to compare the automatically generated summaries by the ASDKGA approach with summaries generated by humans. Also, the approach is compared against three other Arabic text summarization approaches. The (ASDKGA) approach demonstrated promising results when summarizing Arabic political documents with average F-measure of 0.605 at the compression ratio of 40%.