Automatic Summarization of French Scientific Articles by a Discourse Annotation Method using the EXCOM System

Summarization is a complex cognitive task and its simulation is very difficult for machines. This paper presents an automatic summarization strategy that is based on a discourse categorization of the textual information. This categorization is carried out by the automatic identification of discourse markers in texts. We defend here the use of discourse methods in automatic summarization. Two evaluations of the summarization strategy are presented. The summaries produced by our strategy are evaluated with summaries produced by humans and other applications. These two evaluations display well the capacity of our application, based on EXCOM, to produce summaries comparable to the summaries of other applications.