Wednesday 31 August 2011

Automatic text summary

We could use software that can automatically summarise text accurately, given our short attention spans, and it seems quite a few researchers are working on the problem. Of course, the usual method has limits, because proper summaries need to understand the source material, and usually these programs remove some extraneous words. Push too far and too much text is removed, making the result incoherent. Since this is a natural language task, it must involve natural language processing, which is still very difficult, and will probably remain so for a very long time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Microsoft Word used to have a feature like this.
PPS - It seems to have lost it in recent versions.

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