Automatic Abstracting and Summarization

After lying dormant for a few decades, the field of automated text summarization has experienced a tremendous resurgence of interest. Recently, many new algorithms and techniques have been proposed for identifying important information in single documents and document collections, and for mapping this information into grammatical, cohesive, and coherent abstracts. Since 1997, annual workshops, conferences, and large-scale comparative evaluations have provided a rich environment for exchanging ideas between researchers in Asia, Europe, and North America. This entry reviews the main developments in the field and provides a guiding map to those interested in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of an increasingly ubiquitous technology