Summarization of specialized discourse: the case of medical articles in Spanish

In this article, we present the current state of our work on a linguistically-motivated model for automatic summarization of medical articles in Spanish. The model takes into account the results of an empirical study which reveals that, on the one hand, domain-specific summarization criteria can often be derived from the summaries of domain specialists, and, on the other hand, adequate summarization strategies must be multidimensional, i.e., cover various types of linguistic clues. We take into account the textual, lexical, discursive, syntactic and communicative dimensions. This is novel in the field of summarization. The experiments carried out so far indicate that our model is suitable to provide high quality summarizations.