Bar chart showing experimental results.

Automatic text summarization is one of the most promising solutions to the ever-growing challenges of textual data as it produces a shorter version of the original document with fewer bytes, but the same information as the original document. Despite the advancements in automatic text summarization research, research involving the development of automatic text summarization methods for documents written in Hausa, a Chadic language widely spoken in West Africa by approximately 150,000,000 people as either their first or second language, is still in early stages of development. This study proposes a novel graph-based extractive single-document summarization method for Hausa text by modifying the existing PageRank algorithm using the normalized common bigrams count between adjacent sentences as the initial vertex score. The proposed method is evaluated using a primarily collected Hausa summarization evaluation dataset comprising of 113 Hausa news articles on ROUGE evaluation toolkits. The proposed approach outperformed the standard methods using the same datasets. It outperformed the TextRank method by 2.1%, LexRank by 12.3%, centroid-based method by 19.5%, and BM25 method by 17.4%.