The Challenges of Automatic Summarization

13 years 4 months ago

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tion--the art of abstracting key content from one or more information sources--has become an integral part of everyday life. People keep abreast of world affairs by listening to news bites. They base investment decisions on stock market updates. They even go to movies largely on the basis of reviews they've seen. With summaries, they can make effective decisions in less time. Although some summarizing tools are already available, with the increasing volume of online information, it is becoming harder to generate meaningful and timely summaries. Tools such as Microsoft's AutoSummarize option in Office 97, IBM's Intelligent Text Miner, Oracle's Context, and Inxight's Summarizer (part of Alta Vista's search tools) are useful, but their application is limited to extraction--selecting original pieces from the source document and concatenating them to yield a text. Abstraction, in contrast, paraphrases in more general terms what the text is about. The concatenat...

Udo Hahn, Inderjeet Mani

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