Using SUMMA for Language Independent Summarization at TAC 2011

The paper describes a language independent multi-document centroid-based summarization system. The system has been evaluated in the 2011 TAC Multilingual Summarization pilot task where summaries were automatically produced for document clusters in Arabic, English, French and Hindi. The system had a reasonable performance in content selection for languages such as Arabic and Hindi and medium performance for English, but poor performance for French. Evaluation results in content selection for French and summary quality in all languages indicate that the system has to be better adapted to the summarization task.