Automatic summarization is the process of reducing a text document with a computer program in order to create a summary that retains the most important points of the original document. As the problem of information overload has grown, and as the quantity of data has increased, so has interest in automatic summarization. Technologies that can make a coherent summary take into account variables such as length, writing style and syntax. An example of the use of summarization technology is search engines such as Google. Document summarization is another.
Generally, there are two approaches to automatic summarization: extraction and abstraction. Extractive methods work by selecting a subset of existing words, phrases, or sentences in the original text to form the summary. In contrast, abstractive methods build an internal semantic representation and then use natural language generation techniques to create a summary that is closer to what a human might generate. Such a summary might contain words not explicitly present in the original. The state-of-the-art abstractive methods are still quite weak, so most research has focused on extractive methods.
