Text Summarization

Overview

Text summarization condenses documents while preserving key information. Extractive: selects and concatenates important sentences from the original. Abstractive: generates new text that paraphrases the content. Extractive is simpler and more faithful; abstractive is more fluent but may hallucinate.

When to Use

Trigger conditions:

• Condensing long documents, reports, or article collections
• Building automated summary pipelines for content curation
• Comparing extractive vs abstractive approaches for a use case

When NOT to use:

• When full document understanding is needed (summarization loses detail)
• For structured data extraction (use NER or information extraction)

Algorithm