Text Summarization

With the overwhelming amount of textual information available in electronic formats on the web, there is a need for an efficient text summarizer capable of condensing large bodies of text into shorter versions while keeping the relevant information intact. Such a technology would allow users to get their information in a shortened form, saving valuable time. Since 1997, Microsoft Word has included a summarizer for documents, and currently there are companies that summarize breaking news and send SMS for mobile phones. I wish to create a text summarizer to provide condensed versions of original documents. My focus is on blogs, because people are increasingly using this mode of communication to express their opinions on a variety of topics. Consequently, it will be very useful for a reader to be able to employ a concise summary, tailored to his or her own interests to quickly browse through volumes of opinions relevant to any number of topics. Although many summarization methods exist, my approach involves employing the Lanczos algorithm to compute eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a large sparse matrix and SVD (Singular Value Decomposition) as a means of identifying latent topics hidden in contexts; and the next phase of the process involves taking a high-dimensional set of data and reducing it to a lower-dimensional set. This procedure makes it possible to identify the best approximation of the original text. Since SQL makes it possible to allow analyzing data sets and take advantage of the parallel processing available today, in most database management systems, SQL is employed in my project. The utilization of SQL without external math libraries, however, adds to challenge in the computation of the SVD and the Lanczos algorithm

Faithful to the Original: Fact Aware Neural Abstractive Summarization

Unlike extractive summarization, abstractive summarization has to fuse different parts of the source text, which inclines to create fake facts. Our preliminary study reveals nearly 30% of the outputs from a state-of-the-art neural summarization system suffer from this problem. While previous abstractive summarization approaches usually focus on the improvement of informativeness, we argue that faithfulness is also a vital prerequisite for a practical abstractive summarization system. To avoid generating fake facts in a summary, we leverage open information extraction and dependency parse technologies to extract actual fact descriptions from the source text. The dual-attention sequence-to-sequence framework is then proposed to force the generation conditioned on both the source text and the extracted fact descriptions. Experiments on the Gigaword benchmark dataset demonstrate that our model can greatly reduce fake summaries by 80%. Notably, the fact descriptions also bring significant improvement on informativeness since they often condense the meaning of the source text.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, AAAI 201

Text Summarization Techniques: A Brief Survey

In recent years, there has been a explosion in the amount of text data from a variety of sources. This volume of text is an invaluable source of information and knowledge which needs to be effectively summarized to be useful. In this review, the main approaches to automatic text summarization are described. We review the different processes for summarization and describe the effectiveness and shortcomings of the different methods.Comment: Some of references format have update

Generating indicative-informative summaries with SumUM

We present and evaluate SumUM, a text summarization system that takes a raw technical text as input and produces an indicative informative summary. The indicative part of the summary identifies the topics of the document, and the informative part elaborates on some of these topics according to the reader's interest. SumUM motivates the topics, describes entities, and defines concepts. It is a first step for exploring the issue of dynamic summarization. This is accomplished through a process of shallow syntactic and semantic analysis, concept identification, and text regeneration. Our method was developed through the study of a corpus of abstracts written by professional abstractors. Relying on human judgment, we have evaluated indicativeness, informativeness, and text acceptability of the automatic summaries. The results thus far indicate good performance when compared with other summarization technologies