The objective of the 2019 RANLP Multilingual Headline Generation (HG) Task is to explore some of the challenges highlighted by current state of the art approaches on creating informative headlines to news articles: non-descriptive headlines, out-of-domain training data, generating headlines from long documents which are not well represented by the head heuristic, and dealing with multilingual domain. This tasks makes available a large set of training data for headline generation and provides an evaluation methods for the task. Our data sets are drawn from Wikinews as well as Wikipedia. Participants were required to generate headlines for at least 3 languages, which were evaluated via automatic methods. A key aspect of the task is multilinguality. The task measures the performance of multilingual headline generation systems using the Wikipedia and Wikinews articles in multiple languages. The objective is to assess the performance of automatic headline generation techniques on text documents covering a diverse range of languages and topics outside the news domain.

The Financial Narrative Summarisation task at MultiLing 2019 aims to demonstrate the value and challenges of applying automatic text summarisation to financial text written in English, usually referred to as financial narrative disclosures. The task dataset has been extracted from UK annual reports published in PDF file format. The participants were asked to provide structured summaries, based on real-world, publicly available financial annual reports of UK firms by extracting information from different key sections. Participants were asked to generate summaries that reflects the analysis and assessment of the financial trend of the business over the past year, as provided by annual reports. The evaluation of the summaries was performed using AutoSummENG and Rouge automatic metrics. This paper focuses mainly on the data creation process.

This report covers the summarization evaluation task, proposed to the summarization community via the MultiLing 2019 Workshop of the RANLP 2019 conference. The task aims to encourage the development of automatic summarization evaluation methods closely aligned with manual, human-authored summary grades and judgements. A multilingual setting is adopted, building upon a corpus of Wikinews articles across 6 languages (English, Arabic, Romanian, Greek, Spanish and Czech). The evaluation utilizes human (golden) and machine-generated (peer) summaries, which have been assigned human evaluation scores from previous MultiLing tasks. Using these resources, the original corpus is augmented with synthetic data, combining summary texts under three different strategies (reorder, merge and replace), each engineered to introduce noise in the summary in a controlled and quantifiable way. We estimate that the utilization of such data can extract and highlight useful attributes of summary quality estimation, aiding the creation of data-driven automatic methods with an increased correlation to human summary evaluations across domains and languages. This paper provides a brief description of the summary evaluation task, the data generation protocol and the resources made available by the MultiLing community, towards improving automatic summarization evaluation.

MultiLing 2019 Headline Generation Task on Wikipedia Corpus raised a critical and practical problem: multilingual task on low resource corpus. In this paper we proposed QDAS extractive summarization model enhanced by sentence2vec and try to apply transfer learning based on large multilingual pre-trained language model for Wikipedia Headline Generation task. We treat it as sequence labeling task and develop two schemes to handle with it. Experimental results have shown that large pre-trained model can effectively utilize learned knowledge to extract certain phrase using low resource supervised data.

In this study, we examine the effect of probabilistic topic model-based word representations, on sentence-based extractive summarization. We formulate the task of summary extraction as a binary classification problem, and we test a variety of machine learning algorithms, exploring a range of different settings. An wide experimental evaluation on the MultiLing 2015 MSS dataset illustrates that topic-based representations can prove beneficial to the extractive summarization process in terms of F1, ROUGE-L and ROUGE-W scores, compared to a TF-IDF baseline, with QDA-based analysis providing the best results.

Game reviews have constituted a unique means of interaction between players and companies for many years. The dynamics appearing through online publishing have significantly grown the number of comments per game, giving rise to very interesting communities. The growth has, in turn, led to a difficulty in dealing with the volume and varying quality of the comments as a source of information. This work studies whether and how game reviews can be summarized, based on the notions pre-existing in aspect-based summarization and sentiment analysis. The work provides suggested pipeline of analysis, also offering preliminary findings on whether aspects detected in a set of comments can be consistently evaluated by human users.

The Social Web Observatory is an entity-driven, sentiment-aware, event summarization web platform, combining various methods and tools to overview trends across social media and news sources in Greek. SWO crawls, clusters and summarizes information following an entity-centric view of text streams, allowing to monitor the public sentiment towards a specific person, organization or other entity. In this paper, we overview the platform, outline the analysis pipeline and describe a user study aimed to quantify the usefulness of the system and especially the meaningfulness and coherence of discovered events.

Automatic text summarization aims at producing a shorter version of a document (or a document set). Evaluation of summarization quality is a challenging task. Because human evaluations are expensive and evaluators often disagree between themselves, many researchers prefer to evaluate their systems automatically, with help of software tools. Such a tool usually requires a point of reference in the form of one or more human-written summaries for each text in the corpus. Then, a system-generated summary is compared to one or more human-written summaries, according to selected metrics. However, a single metric cannot reflect all quality-related aspects of a summary. In this paper we present the EvAluation SYstem for Multilingual Summarization (EASY-M), which enables the evaluation of system-generated summaries in 17 different languages with several quality measures, based on comparison with their human-generated counterparts. The system also provides comparative results with two built-in baselines. The source code and both online and offline versions of EASY-M is freely available for the NLP community.

In this study we examine the effect of semantic augmentation approaches on extractive text summarization. Wordnet hypernym relations are used to extract term-frequency concept information, subsequently concatenated to sentence-level representations produced by aggregated deep neural word embeddings. Multiple dimensionality reduction techniques and combination strategies are examined via feature transformation and clustering methods. An experimental evaluation on the MultiLing 2015 MSS dataset illustrates that semantic information can introduce benefits to the extractive summarization process in terms of F1, ROUGE-1 and ROUGE-2 scores, with LSA-based post-processing introducing the largest improvements.

Automatic headline generation is a subtask of one-line summarization with many reported applications. Evaluation of systems generating headlines is a very challenging and undeveloped area. We introduce the Headline Evaluation and Analysis System (HEvAS) that performs automatic evaluation of systems in terms of a quality of the generated headlines. HEvAS provides two types of metrics– one which measures the informativeness of a headline, and another that measures its readability. The results of evaluation can be compared to the results of baseline methods which are implemented in HEvAS. The system also performs the statistical analysis of the evaluation results and provides different visualization charts. This paper describes all evaluation metrics, baselines, analysis, and architecture, utilized by our system.