Impact of stemming on Arabic text summarization

Stemming is a process of reducing inflected words to their stem or root from a generally written word form. This process is used in many text mining application as a feature selection technique. Moreover, Arabic text summarization has increasingly become an important task in natural language processing area (NLP). Therefore, the aim of this paper is to evaluate the impact of three different Arabic stemmers (i.e. Khoja, Larekey and Alkhalil's stemmer) on the text summarization performance for Arabic language. The evaluation of the proposed system, with the three different stemmers and without stemming, on the dataset used shows that the best performance was achieved by Khoja stemmer in term of recall, precision and F1-measure. The evaluation also shows that the performances of the proposed system are significantly improved by applying the stemming process in the pre-processing stage.