Extractive multi-document text summarization using a multi-objective artificial bee colony optimization approach

Abstract Automatic text summarization methods are increasingly needed nowadays. Extractive multi-document summarization approaches aim to obtain the main content of a document collection at the same time that the redundant information is reduced. This can be addressed from an optimization point of view. There is a lack of multi-objective approaches applied in this context. In this paper, a Multi-Objective Artificial Bee Colony (MOABC) algorithm has been designed and implemented for this task. Experiments have been performed based on datasets from Document Understanding Conference (DUC) and model performances have been evaluated with Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE) metrics, as is usual in this knowledge field. The results of the proposed approach show important improvements, i.e., in average, 31.09% (8.43%) and 18.63% (6.09%) of improvement in ROUGE-2 (ROUGE-L) have been obtained with respect to the best single-objective and multi-objective results in the scientific literature. Even more, the proposed approach has been proven to produce more concentrated ROUGE values when the algorithm execution is repeated (between 620.63% and 1333.95% of reduction in the relative dispersion, that is, between 6 and 13 times better), leading to more robust results.