Using lexical chains for text summarization

We investigate one technique to produce a summary of an original text without requiring its full semantic interpretation, but instead relying on a model of the topic progression in the text derived from lexical chains. We present a new algorithm to compute lexical chains in a text, merging several robust knowledge sources: the WordNet thesaurus, a part-of-speech tagger, shallow parser for the identification of nominal groups, and a segmentation algorithm. Summarization proceeds in four steps: the original text is segmented, lexical chains are constructed strong chains are identified and significant sentences are extracted.