2016 International Conference on Next Generation Intelligent Systems (ICNGIS)

Malayalam Text Summarization: An Extractive

Approach
Krishnaprasad P∗ , Sooryanarayanan A† and Ajeesh Ramanujan‡
∗ Dept. of Computer Science
Govt. Engineering College Sreekrishnapuram
Email: krishnaprasadpguptha@gmail.com
† Dept. of Computer Science

Govt. Engineering College Sreekrishnapuram

Email: asooryanarayanan@gmail.com
‡ Asst. Professor, Govt. Engineering College Sreekrishnapuram

Email:ajeeshramanujan@gmail.com

Abstract—Automatic summarization of text is on of the area of
interest in the field of natural language processing. The proposed
method utilizes the sentence extraction in a single document
and produces a generic summary for a given Malayalam doc-
ument (Extractive summarization). Sentences in the document
are ranked based on the word score of each word present in
it. Top N ranked sentences are extracted and arrange them
in their chronological order for summary generation, where N
represents the size of summary with respect to the percentage of
original document size (condensation rate). The standard metric
ROUGE is used for performance evaluation. ROUGE calculates
the n-gram overlap between a generated summary and reference
summaries. Reference summaries were constructed manually.
Experiments show that the results are promising.
Keywords − Text Summarization, Sentence Extraction,
Content Word Extraction, Natural Language Processing,
ROUGE.
I. I NTRODUCTION
With the enormous growth of Internet, a large collection
of texts are available in the web. Some of them duplicates
the content present in others. Whenever a user needs to get
some information, he needs to retrieve these documents and
read them completely to understand the content. This is a time
consuming and tedious process and is very difficult for human
beings to manually summarize these large documents of text.
There comes the importance of automatic summarization.
Text summarization is the condensation of the source text by
reducing the size along with preserving significant information
content and overall meaning. The text summarization done
with the machine is termed as automatic text summarization.
These summarization tools can help people to grasp the main
information contents in a short time. A good summary can
give a quick overview of a large document.
Mainly the text summarization techniques can be gener-
ally classifieds into extractive summarization and abstractive
summarization. In extractive summarization, important and
meaningful sentences or phrases from the source documents
are extracted. These sentences are arranged chronologically
to produce the summary. In extractive summary, there is no
word or phrase present in the summary outside of the given
document. The summary created using these sentences may
not be coherent, but gives idea about the content of the input
document. Abstract summarization system understands the
contents of the document and then it creates summaries with
its own words. The abstractive summarization aims to produce
a generalized summary, gives the information in a concise way,
and it needs advanced natural language generation techniques
[4]. In general, abstractive methods make semantic represen-
tation of a given text and then use natural language generation
techniques to create a summary which is very much similar to
a human generated summary. Such an abstract summary might
contain words not explicitly present in the original document.
An abstract of a research article is a good example for abstract
summarization.
Another text summarization classification is single-
document summarization and multi-document summarization.
Early works in summarization started with single document
summarization. In single document summarization, it produces
summary of a single document supplied by the user. As the
tremendous changes in research, and with the huge amount
of information on Internet, multi document summarization
emerged. Because information is spread over different doc-
uments, it needs to collect from these different documents.
In multi document summarization, it produces summaries
from many source documents on the same topic or same
event. Obviously multi-document summarization is a more
complex task than the single-document summarization. There
are two major reasons for this. Firstly, there is a chance of
information overlap between the documents and this can lead
to redundancy in the summary. Secondly, an extra effort is
needed to collect and organize the information from different
several documents to form a coherent summary. In the field
of text summarization, significant achievements have been
obtained using sentence extraction and statistical analysis.
Malayalam is a regional language spoken in India, predomi-
nantly in Kerala state. Malayalam includes in the 22 scheduled
languages of India and one of the 6 Classical Languages in
India. Malayalam got the designation of Classical Language
in 2013. it has official language status in Kerala state and

978-1-5090-0870-4/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE

 2016 International Conference on Next Generation Intelligent Systems (ICNGIS)
in the union territories of Puducherry and Lakshadweep.
Malayalam belongs to the Dravidian family of languages and
about 38 million people speak it. It is also spoken in Tamil
Nadu and Karnataka; with some peoples in the Kanyakumari,
Coimbatore, and Nilgiri districts of Tamil Nadu, and Kodagu
and Dakshina Kannada districts of Karnataka [16]. The field
of Malayalam text summarization will unveil the number of
applications such as topic modelling and Malayalam search
engines. The new insight will lighten up summarizing the
official, legal and technical documents in Malayalam. Our
extractive summarization method is sufficient for figuring out
the contents of such documents. To our knowledge, very few
works are conducted in Malayalam text summarization.
II. R ELATED WORKS
During the last years, text summarization becomes an areas
of interest in Natural language processing. The need for an
automatic text summarization has got increased, because of the
availability of huge amount of documents in the Internet. K .
S . Jones [8] defines summary as a reductive transformation of
given input document to summary document with the process
of reduction of content by selecting and generalizing on what
is important in the input document. That paper suggests the
basic process model as a three-stage process of (i) source
text interpretation to source text representation, (ii) source
representation transformation to summary text representation
and (iii) summary text generation from summary represen-
tation. D. Shen et al. [14] differentiates the two approaches
to text summarization as abstract based and extract based
summarizations. H. P. Luhn [11] presented the idea that
frequently occurring words (except stop words) signify the
overall content of the document.
Dhanya P. M et al. [5] performed a comparative study of
text summarization works available in Indian languages. It
includes two summarization methods each from Tamil [13,
10], Kannada [6, 7] and one each from Odia [2], Bengali [9],
Punjabi [15] and Gujarathi [1] and is used for comparison.
A three sentences sample text was taken as an example and
they tried to find out the summary sentences using all the eight
methods. From this comparison, they found that these methods
uses a set of features of sentences and are used for ranking the
sentences. Punjabi method uses ten such features(maximum)
while Odia uses a single feature(minimum). Accuracy of
summarization depends on the number of features used and its
contributions to the summary. These summarization techniques
give recall scores of 0.45, 0.48, 0.43, 0.66, 0.42, 0.412, 0.42,
0.82 respectively. In almost all summarization techniques,
testing is carried out by comparing the system generated
results with the human generated summaries.
Renjith S. R et al. [12] suggests a sentence extraction based
single document text summarization for Malayalam document.
They calculate the scores based on sentence features. Then
calculate the rank using the Google’s Page Rank formula. The
top k ranked sentences were picked up from the original text to
be included in summary where k depends on the compression
ratio of original to summary.
III. P ROPOSED SYSTEM
The summarization system uses simple heuristics based
extractive summarization. We assume that the summary can
be generated by recombining the extracted important sentences
from the text. In order to identify the important sentences in
the text we follow content word extraction method. By simple
heuristics we assume that we can extract out the content words
from the frequency distribution of word except the stop words.
The words with higher frequency may represent the document
without information loss. The summarization system com-
prises of two components as text analysing component and the
summary generation component. Text analysing component is
used to identify the features associated with the sentences and
based on the features, it assign a score to each sentence in the
text. In summary generation component, it utilizes the sentence
scores calculated in the text analysing component for summary
generation.
Firstly text normalization process is performed and it in-
volves the splitting the text into sentences and further split
sentences into words. Then the normalized text is used for fea-
ture extraction process. This feature extraction process extracts
the features associated with the sentences and the features
associated with words respectively. For this purpose, the main
features such as frequency of a word, number of characters
in a word etc. are used. After the feature extraction process,
the system will calculates a score for each sentence in the text
and this score is used for summary generation. Sentences with
high scores are selected and a sentence refinement is done
on the sentences. Then these refined sentences are used for
the summary generation with keeping the same chronological
order as they were found in the original input text document.
Fig 1. shows the various tasks involved in the summarization
system.
Text analysing component involves the tasks of sentence
marking, feature extraction and sentence ranking. The sum-
mary generation component comprises of mainly two tasks a
sentence selection and summary generation tasks. These tasks
are detailed below.
Sentence marking task initially divides the document into
sentences. Using end-of-sentence punctuation marks, such as
periods, question marks, and exclamation points, are sufficient
for marking the sentence boundaries. It should be noted
that exclamation point and question mark are somewhat less
ambiguous when compared to periods. Sentence marking
has much importance because we will use the sentence for
generating summary. Periods can be appeared in non standard
words like abbreviations, this creates serious problem during
sentence marking process.
The Feature extraction task extracts both the sentence level
and word level features. For picking out best sentence from
a given document we follow the sentence scoring technique
based on word frequency and average number of characters
per sentence. The heuristics suggest that the highly frequent
words except the stop words can convey the general idea of the
document. We include the feature, average number of character
 2016 International Conference on Next Generation Intelligent Systems (ICNGIS)
Fig. 1. Architecture of the Summarization System
per word, from our world knowledge by assuming the lengthy
words are more important.
In Sentence ranking task, a simple and efficient sentence
ranking method based on the frequency words in the text and
average number of characters in each word. The system will
rank each and every sentence in the given text with the above
sentence ranking method. The heart of the summarization
system is this sentence ranking method. The quality of the
generated summary will greatly depends on this sentence
ranking method.
After the sentences are scored, next task is the sentence
selection and it needs to select the sentences that make a good
summary. After selecting the sentences with high score, they
got a sentence level refinement. After the sentence selection
task, the next is summary generation task. One of the summary
generation methods is to pick the N top scored sentence
towards the summary. But this will create the problem of
coherence. Once the sentences are selected, these sentences are
recombined in the chronological order present in the original
input text for getting a readable summary. The sentences are
selected based on the percentage of output text summary
required with respect to the input document. This stage gives
us a number of research scopes on text summarization. The
quality of the generated summary depends on the sentence
ranking and sentence selection procedure.
IV. E VALUATION AND RESULTS
To decide whether a given summary is good or bad is
a very difficult task. The summary evaluation methods can
be done by two ways as evaluation by human and methods
of automatic evaluation. In human evaluation, human judges
compare system-generated summaries with model summaries.
Then the judges may gives a score in a predefined scale to each
summary under the evaluation process. Qualitative features
like fluency, information content, coherence etc. are used for
this scoring. Some of the problems associated with human
evaluation process are, it may be tedious and it suffers from
the lack of consistency.
Two human judges may not agree on each other’s judge-
ment. On the other hand, automatic evaluation is always
consistent with a judgement. The problem with automatic eval-
uations is, it may not consider linguistic skills and emotional
perspectives of a human. Even automatic evaluation is not
good as compared to the evaluation of human, it is generally
preferred. Because the process of evaluation is faster even if
there are huge number of summaries. Another advantage of
automatic evaluation is that, it uses the same logic and always
gives a common result on a given summary. And automatic
evaluation process is also free from the bias of human, it
consistently compares the various summarization systems.
To our knowledge, there is no Malayalam summarizer sys-
tem which shows their performance. So we decided to select
the condensation percentage which gives better result. For that,
first we create a corpus of 50 news articles from Mathrubhumi,
a Malayalam daily, during the period of November 2015. From
these 50 news we randomly select 10 news and create 2
reference summaries for each news.
The randomly selected 10 news articles are supplied to
our system for generating summary. For each news article
our system generates 4 summaries based on the condensation
rate of 10, 15, 20 and 25 percentage respectively. These
system generated summaries are evaluated with the reference
summaries, by using the standard metric ROUGE [3]. The
theory behind the ROUGE-N measure, is the number of
overlapping units such as n-grams present in both system
generated summary and reference summary. The ROUGE-
N score is a recall-related measure and can be calculated as
follows :
 
Countmatch (gramn )
S∈{Ref erenceSummaries} gramn ∈S
ROU GE − N =
 
Count(gramn )
S∈Ref erenceSummaries gramn ∈S
Where n represents the n-gram length, gramn represents
the maximum number of n-grams co-occurring in a candidate
summary, and Countmatch (gramn ) represents the maximum
number of n-grams co-occurring in a set of reference sum-
maries. ROUGE-1 and ROUGE-2 scores are calculated for
these 10 news article for different percentage condensation
summary average is taken. Obtained results are tabulated in
Table I.
 2016 International Conference on Next Generation Intelligent Systems (ICNGIS)

System (Based on condensation rate) ROUGE-1 ROUGE-2

[11] H.P. Luhn, “”The automatic creation of literature abstracts, ” IBM
10 Percentage 0.256935 0.225331 Journal of Research Development, 1958, pp. 159-165.
15 Percentage 0.371939 0.339387 [12] Renjith. S. R and Sony. P, “An automatic text summarization for Malay-
20 Percentage 0.443436 0.405756 alam using sentence extraction,” Proceedings of 27th IRF International
25 Percentage 0.570577 0.538460 Conference, Chennai, India, ISBN: 978-93-85465-35-2, 14th June 2015.
[13] Sankar K, Vijay Sundar Ram R and Sobha Lalitha Devi, “Text extraction
TABLE I for an agglutinative language,” Problems of Parsing in Indian Languages,
ROUGE E VALUATION S CORES Special Volume, May 2011.
[14] D. Shen, J. T. Sun, H. Li, Q. Yang, and Z. Chen, “Document summariza-
tion using conditional random fields,” In IJCAI, 2007, pp. 2862-2867.
[15] Vishal Gupta and Gurpreet Singh Lehal, “Features selection and weight
From the result, it is clear that when the condensation rate learning for Punjabi text summarization,” International Journal of Engi-
of summary increases, the ROUGE scores also increases. For neering Trends and Technology, vol. 2, Issue 2, 2011.
the 10 percentage condensation summary, this method yields [16] “Malayalam - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.” [On-line], Available:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayalam, [Accessed: 18-Oct-2015].
poor result. This is because most of the news taken contains 10
to 20 sentences. So, when we take 10 percentage condensed
summary, it contains the most important one or two sentence
which can’t represent the whole document in content.

V. C ONCLUSION AND F UTURE W ORKS

This paper presents a novel method for single document
text summarization for Malayalam. There are several sum-
marization techniques available for English, but a very few
attempts have been made for Malayalam text summarization.
The quality of the summary can be improved by improving
the sentence scoring stage. The performance of the proposed
system may further be improved by including stemming pro-
cess, improvement in sentence splitting criteria and adding
more number of features. It can use any number of reference
summaries in ROUGE evaluation. On increasing the number
of reference summaries, we can improve the ROUGE score,
but due to the practical difficulty we created only two manual
summaries for each news article. There is scope for adding
more manual reference summaries.

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