SIGdial 2015

16th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

The University of Alicante at MultiLing 2015: approach, results and further insights

Marta Vicente, Oscar Alcon and Elena Lloret
In this paper we present the approach and results of our participation in the 2015 MultiLing Single-document Summarization task. Our approach is based on the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) technique enhanced with lexical-semantic knowledge. For testing our approach, different configurations were set up, thus generating different types of summaries (i.e., generic and topic-focused), as well as testing some language-specific resources on top of the language-independent basic PCA approach, submitting a total of 6 runs for each selected language (English, German, and Spanish). Our participation in MultiLing has been very positive, ranking at intermediate positions when compared to the other participant systems, showing that PCA is a good technique for generating language-independent summaries, but the addition of lexical-semantic knowledge may heavily depend on the size and quality of the resources available for each language.