Abstract. In this paper, we introduce DegExt, a graph-based languageindependent keyphrase extractor,which extends the keyword extraction method described in [6]. We compare DegExt with two state-of-the-art approaches to keyphrase extraction: GenEx [11] and TextRank [8]. Our experiments on a collection of benchmark summaries show that DegExt outperforms TextRank and GenEx in terms of precision and area under curve (AUC) for summaries of 15 keyphrases or more at the expense of a non-significant decrease of recall and F-measure. Moreover, DegExt surpasses both GenEx and TextRank in terms of implementation simplicity and computational complexity.