The advent of new media has brought about ease of sourcing and accessing information. One can find material for any kind of topic online with so much ease.
In recent times the problem has moved from lack of access to information to availability of too much information which often leads to confusion and difficulty in processing. One would wish there was a way to summarize lengthy texts and just get straight to the point.
Automatic text summarization is now made possible online, helping one to reduce the length of information found online, filter and select only the important information thereby reducing the length of the original text. Text summarization is made possible through a summary maker.
The summary maker uses software technology to summarize documents, picking out salient points among the host of information available in the document.
At present, text summarization can either be Abstraction based or extraction based; either of the types have their features and advantages.
Abstraction-based summarization when applied to a document shortens the length of the original text. Due to the advanced nature of this summary generator, it is just as smart as the human mind when it comes to summary making and could even create original words and sentences while summarizing existing text. Above all, it extracts all important information from the document and places them in the summarized text.
In Extraction based summarization on the other hand, the summarized document is made up of groups of most important or most repeated words within the text. This extraction based method uses highlighting to locate major information and bring them together to summarize a text. Summaries done will consist of words that occur numerous times in the original article.
Comparing both methods of text summarization
- Extractive summarization method makes more stable results accessible when compared to abstractive method while abstractive method produces more cognitive human based summary.
- Abstractive summarization offers more accuracy and orderliness in its summarization than extractive method which is a combination of texts that are easy to read and understand.
Uses and importance of automatic text summarization
- It makes online research easier by reducing the length of document one has to go through and in shorter time.
- Generation of research abstract by students and scholars alike is easier through summarization.
- Researchers, teachers, students alike can make use of summarizers to decipher whether a document has the necessary information they need or not