Research and implementation of multilingual automatic text abstracting methods

This paper addresses the problem of multi-lingual text summarisation. The goal is to analyse three approaches for generat-ing summaries in four languages (English, Spanish, German and French), in order to determine the best one to adopt when tack-ling this issue. The proposed approaches rely on: i) language-independent tech-niques; ii) language-specific resources; and iii) machine translation resources applied to a mono-lingual summariser. The evaluation carried out employing the JRC corpus - a corpus specifically created for multi-lingual summarisation - shows that the approach which uses language-specific resources is the most appropriate in our comparison framework, performing better than state-of-the-art multi-lingual summarisers. Moreover, the readability assessment conducted over the resulting summaries for this approach proves that they are also very competitive with respect to their quality.