This paper addresses the problem of readability of automatically generated summaries in the context of second language learning. For this we experimented with a new corpus of level-annotated simplified English texts. The texts were summarized using a total of 7 extractive and abstractive summarization systems with compression rates of 20%, 40%, 60% and 80%. We analyzed the generated summaries in terms of lexical, syntactic and length-based features of readability, and concluded that summary complexity depends on the compression rate, summarization technique and the nature of the summarized corpus. Our experiments demonstrate the importance of choosing appropriate summarization techniques that align with user’s needs and language proficiency.

In this paper we describe how an abstractive text summarization method improved the informativeness of automatic summaries by integrating syntactic text simplification, subject-verb-object concept frequency scoring and a set of rules that transform text into its semantic representation. We analyzed the impact of each component of our approach on the quality of generated summaries and tested it on DUC 2002 dataset. Our experiments showed that our approach outperformed other state-of-the-art abstractive methods while maintaining acceptable linguistic quality and redundancy rate.