Porting a summarizer to the French language

Abstract

We describe the porting of the English language REZIME text summarizer to the French language. REZIME is a single-document summarizer particularly focused on summarization of medical documents. Summaries are created by extracting key sentences from the original document. The sentence selection employs machine learning techniques, using statistical, syntactic and lexical features which are computed based on specialized language resources. The REZIME system was initially developed for English documents.In this paper we present the summarizer architecture, and describe the steps required to adapt it to the French language. The summarizer performance is evaluated for English and French datasets. Results show that the adaptation to French results in a system performance comparable to English