Spanish Automatic Text Summarization: A Survey

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an accelerated growth in the amount of text data from various sources. This volume of text is an invaluable source of information and knowledge that needs to be effectively summarized. However, it is not very easy for human beings to summarize large documents of text manually. Therefore, automatic text summarization has become an essential and appropriate tool for assisting and interpreting text information; there is not usually enough time to read and understand each document and make decisions based on document contents. Hence, there is an excellent demand for summarizing text documents to provide a representative idea for the original documents. Furthermore, summarization systems and state-of-the-art methods offer the possibility of finding the main ideas of texts, and so the user will spend less time reading the whole document. Automatic text summarization has been a field of intensive research over the last 60 years, especially for commonly used languages such as English, leaving aside other languages equally important. This paper presents the most relevant approaches in automatic text summarization for the Spanish language, describes the main challenges for Spanish automatic text summarization and surveys the various methodologies, corpus, and systems in the literature. This survey is a compilation of the works in Spanish automatic text summarization and is intended to be a basis for research in the task.