Automatic Summarization (Foundations and Trends(r) in Information Retrieval)

Today's world is all about information, most of it online. The World Wide Web contains billions of documents and is growing at an exponential pace. Tools that provide timely access to, and digest of, various sources are necessary in order to alleviate the information overload people are facing. The need for such tools sparked interest in the development of automatic summarization systems. Such systems are designed to take a single article, a cluster of news articles, a broadcast news show, or an email thread as input, and produce a concise and fluent summary of the most important information. Recent years have seen the development of numerous summarization applications for news, email threads, lay and professional medical information, scientific articles, spontaneous dialogues, voicemail, broadcast news and video, and meeting recordings. These systems, imperfect as they are, have already been shown to help users and to enhance other automatic applications and interfaces. Automatic Summarization provides a comprehensive overview of research in summarization, including the more traditional efforts in sentence extraction as well as the most novel recent approaches for determining important content, for domain and genre specific summarization and for evaluation of summarization. It also discusses the challenges that remain open, in particular the need for language generation and deeper semantic understanding of language that would be necessary for future advances in the field.