Text Summarization in Digital Libraries: Development and Evaluation of a Multi-document Summarization Method for Research Abstracts

With the rapid growth of the World Wide Web, more and more information is available and accessible online and information overload becomes a big problem for users. Automatic text summarization is regarded as a solution for reducing information overload and helping users scan a large number of documents to identify documents of interest. It is an important function that should be available in digital library systems and other information retrieval systems. This book focuses on the development and evaluation of a new method for automatic summarization of a set of research abstracts in the context of building a digital library of research articles. It also provides an introduction to text summarization, reviews various approaches which have been used for single-document and multi-document summarization, and outlines the principle trends of the area. This book is useful to students, researchers and practitioners interested in text summarization and digital libraries both as a learning text and as a reference book, or anyone else who wants to obtain a clear overview of text summarization.

Dr. Ou is a professor of information management at Nanjing University, China. She obtained her PhD degree in the field of information science at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at Research Institute in Information and Language Processing, University of Wolverhampton, UK.