Recent advances in document summarization

• Published in: Knowledge and information systems 2017-11, Vol.53 (2), p.297-336
• Main Authors: Yao, Jin-ge, Wan, Xiaojun, Xiao, Jianguo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Computer Science; Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery; Database Management; Electronic documents; Information processing; Information Storage and Retrieval; Information Systems and Communication Service; Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet); Information technology; IT in Business; Sentences; Summaries; Survey Paper
• ISSN: 0219-1377; 0219-3116
• DOI: 10.1007/s10115-017-1042-4

The task of automatic document summarization aims at generating short summaries for originally long documents. A good summary should cover the most important information of the original document or a cluster of documents, while being coherent, non-redundant and grammatically readable. Numerous approaches for automatic summarization have been developed to date. In this paper we give a self-contained, broad overview of recent progress made for document summarization within the last 5 years. Specifically, we emphasize on significant contributions made in recent years that represent the state-of-the-art of document summarization, including progress on modern sentence extraction approaches that improve concept coverage, information diversity and content coherence, as well as attempts from summarization frameworks that integrate sentence compression, and more abstractive systems that are able to produce completely new sentences. In addition, we review progress made for document summarization in domains, genres and applications that are different from traditional settings. We also point out some of the latest trends and highlight a few possible future directions.