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Multi-source, Multilingual Information Extraction and Summarization pp 3–21Cite as

Automatic Text Summarization: Past, Present and Future

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Abstract

Automatic text summarization, the computer-based production of condensed versions of documents, is an important technology for the information society. Without summaries it would be practically impossible for human beings to get access to the ever growing mass of information available online. Although research in text summarization is over 50 years old, some efforts are still needed given the insufficient quality of automatic summaries and the number of interesting summarization topics being proposed in different contexts by end users (“domain-specific summaries”, “opinion-oriented summaries”, “update summaries”, etc.). This paper gives a short overview of summarization methods and evaluation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Rouge was inspired by BLEU, a measure used in the evaluation of machine translation also based on the comparison of n-grams [52].

  2. 2.

    Hovy et al. [19] also proposed an approach of this kind with the notion of Basic Units.

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Acknowledgements

Horacio Saggion is grateful to a fellowship from Programa Ramón y Cajal, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spain. Thierry Poibeau is supported by the “Empirical Fundations of Linguistics” labex, Sorbonne-Paris-Cité. We acknowledge the support from the editors of this volume.

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  1. Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, C/Tanger 122, Barcelona, 08018, Spain

    Horacio Saggion

  2. Laboratoire LaTTiCe-CNRS, École Normale Supérieure and Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, 1 rue Maurice Arnoux, Montrouge, 92120, France

    Thierry Poibeau

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  1. Horacio Saggion
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  1. Universite Sorbonne Nouvelle, LATTICE-CNRS, Ecole Normale Superieure and, rue d'Ulm 45, Paris, 75005, France

    Thierry Poibeau

  2. , Information & Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, C/ Tanger 122-140, Barcelona, 08018, Spain

    Horacio Saggion

  3. Institute for Computer Science, Polish Acadmey of Science, ul. Jana Kazimierza 5, Warsaw, 01-248, Poland

    Jakub Piskorski

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Gustaf Hällströmin katu 2, Helsinki, 00014, Finland

    Roman Yangarber

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Saggion, H., Poibeau, T. (2013). Automatic Text Summarization: Past, Present and Future. In: Poibeau, T., Saggion, H., Piskorski, J., Yangarber, R. (eds) Multi-source, Multilingual Information Extraction and Summarization. Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28569-1_1

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