Multilingual Wikipedia, Summarization, and Information Trustworthiness

Wikipedia is used as a corpus for a variety of text processing applications. It is especially popular for information selec- tion tasks, such as summarization feature identification, an- swer generation/verification, etc. Many Wikipedia entries (about people, events, locations, etc.) have descriptions in several languages. Often Wikipedia entry descriptions cre- ated in different languages exhibit differences in length and content. In this paper we show that the pattern of infor- mation overlap across the descriptions written in different languages for the same Wikipedia entry fits well the pyra- mid summary framework, i.e., some information facts are covered in the Wikipedia entry descriptions in many lan- guages, while others are covered in a handful number of descriptions. This phenomenon leads to a natural summa- rization algorithm which we present in this paper. Accord- ing to our evaluation, the generated summaries have a high level of user satisfaction. Moreover, the discovered pyramid structure of Wikipedia entry descriptions can be used for Wikipedia information trustworthiness verification.