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Summarization

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

  • 31 Accesses

Synonyms

Automatic abstracting; Distillation; Report writing; Text/document summarization

Definition

Summarization systems generate condensed outputs that convey important information contained in one or more sources for particular users and tasks. In principle, input sources and system outputs are not limited to text (e.g., key frame extraction for video summarization), but this entry focuses exclusively on generating textual summaries from textual sources.

Historical Background

Summarization has a long history dating back to the 1960s, when researchers first started developing computer systems that processed natural language [6, 12]. Following a number of decades with comparatively few publications, summarization research entered a new phase in the 1990s. A revival of interest was spurred by the growing availability of text in electronic formats and later the World Wide Web. The enormous quantities of information people come into contact with on a daily basis created a need for...

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Recommended Reading

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  4. Document understanding conferences. http://duc.nist.gov/.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Jimmy Lin

Authors
  1. Jimmy Lin
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jimmy Lin .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Library, Archival & Inf. Studies, The Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

    Edie Rasmussen

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Lin, J. (2018). Summarization. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_953

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