Product Description

Presents developments in automatic text summarization in an integrated framework, suggesting future research areas. The book covers: classical approaches; corpus-based approaches; exploiting discourse structre; knowledge-rich approaches; evaluation methods; and summarization problem areas.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1453837 in Books
• Published on: 1999-08-27
• Format: Abridged
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 442 pages

Customer Reviews

Useful overview of papers on automatic text summarization
..Advances in automatic text summarization' by Mani & Maybury is a very useful overview of papers on automatic text summarization. It divides all kinds of automatic summarization techniques in six sections, in accordance with six main developments in the field: classical approaches, corpus-based approaches, exploiting discourse structure, knowledge-rich approaches, evaluation methods, and new summarization problem areas. The introduction to the book defines the field of text summarization in terms of a terminological and historical explanation.

The most important achievement of Mani & Maybury is the fact that they are the first to provide a state-of-the-art collection of papers in the important field of automatic text summarization. Another point is that 'Advances in automatic text summarization' represents both classical and contemporary research. This enables the reader to clearly see the evolution in the field of automatic text summarization. Furthermore I agree with Mani & Maybury when they stress the growing importance of the field itself with the rapid growth of the World Wide Web and on-line information services. The consequence of this growing amount of information available is after all a growing need for summarization. In recognition of this need, automatic text summarization has increasingly aroused interest in both research and commercial sector.

The disadvantage of using a collection of papers is obviously that there is no coherent terminology and structure. This may confuse the reader a bit, or at least not give him something to hold on to. Still it doesn't counterbalance the richness we are offered because of the fact that Mani & Maybury use different papers from different researchers all over the world. By doing this they also offer a very representative picture of the developments in automatic text summarization.

A second remark is the fact that, apart from the introduction, the information we get is rather specialized. Someone without any foreknowledge of speech and language processing, information retrieval, computational linguistics, ... will have serious difficulty in reading the book and understanding the different techniques. The introduction on the other hand is very clear for undergraduates as well. Whereas Mani & Maybury stress the multiple uses their work may have, I don't agree with the statement that it is fully accessible for non-specialists.

On the whole I think this book will not be fully understood by a layman or someone without any foreknowledge of speech and language processing or related fields. On the other hand I would advise anyone who is involved in the domains I enumerated earlier in my review to consider buying this book. It offers a handy and representative survey of the research that has been done and it serves as a standard reference guide for further research.