clstk: The Cross-Lingual Summarization Tool-Kit

Cross-lingual summarization (CLS) aims to create summaries in a target language, from a document or document set given in a different, source language. Cross-lingual summarization can play a critical role in enabling cross-lingual information access for millions of people across the globe who do not speak or understand languages having large representation on the web. It can also make documents originally published in local languages quickly accessible to a large audience which does not understand those local languages. Though cross-lingual summarization has gathered some attention in the last decade, there has been no serious effort to publish rigorous software for this task. In this paper, we provide a design for an end-to-end CLS software called clstk. Besides implementing a number of methods proposed by different CLS researchers over years, the software integrates multiple components critical for CLS. We hope that this extremely modular tool-kit will help CLS researchers to contribute more effectively to the area.