Today, most subject matters found online are often explained in long and sometimes ambiguous writings that make the extraction of vital facts from such texts difficult and time-consuming.

To efficiently summarize any text, you need to select the very essential details embedded in it so as to reduce its length but still maintain its readability. If the summaries are to be done online, the application of certain software and tech features may be involved.

Methods of Making Automatic Summaries

There are two approaches by which a summary generator summarizes a text and they are:

Summary by Extraction

In this summarization method, the essential words in a text are extracted and brought together to form a concise version of the main text. This method of making summary works like a marker pen I.e. it makes emphasis of important parts of the text and then retains them for the reduced text.

In a nutshell, the summarized text is usually comprised of the emphasized words and phrases as well as repeated and frequently used words.

However, the main disadvantage of this method of summarizing a text is that the extract may not always have grammatically correct sentences and can sometimes be difficult to understand.

Summary by Abstraction

Summary by abstraction is a method of summary making that produces concise versions of texts with outcomes that are very much similar to summaries made by people. This is because a more complex technology is applied in the summarization using this approach.

In this method of text summarization, important words and phrases are not only emphasized and extracted, they are also processed and sometimes rewritten in new but similar words or phrases. Software that are used to accomplish this kind of summary are also known as summary generators because they create new words for the new text.

Another exciting feature of this method of summary-making is that the grammatical structures of the new sentences are usually very accurate as the new words are usually generated in line with the context where they are used.

Of two ways through which we can summarize a text, the method of summary by abstraction makes for a more acceptable summary maker because the produced summary is usually comprehensive and well-structured.

However, while the method of summary by abstraction happens to be a better approach to summary, it known for inconsistent results as it can give different summaries of the same text at different times. Nonetheless, more work is being done in this area to improve the consistency of the summaries that can be obtained via this method.

Importance of Automatic Text Summarization

• It saves research time as summaries can be read in place of the originally longer texts between searches.
• Business analysts can maximize time by using automatic summarizers to discover which document should be read and which should be ignored.
• With automatic text summarizers, students and people in the academics can easily create abstracts for their research work and projects.
• It shortens the time required to read every text in every fields.