Automatic Summarization

With the explosion in the quantity of on-line text and multimedia information in recent years, there has been a renewed interest in automatic summarization. This book provides a systematic introduction to the field, explaining basic definitions, the strategies used by human summarizers, and automatic methods that leverage linguistic and statistical knowledge to produce extracts and abstracts. Drawing from a wealth of research in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and information retrieval, the book also includes detailed assessments of evaluation methods and new topics such as multi-document and multimedia summarization. Previous automatic summarization books have been either collections of specialized papers, or else authored books with only a chapter or two devoted to the field as a whole. This is the first textbook on the subject, developed based on teaching materials used in two one-semester courses. To further help the student reader, the book includes detailed case studies, accompanied by end-of-chapter reviews and an extensive glossary.Audience: students and researchers, as well as information technology managers, librarians, and anyone else interested in the subject.

Shirley J. Linicum, in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, March 2002:
Mani thoroughly analyzes a diverse body of research and demonstrates its relevance to automatic text summarization, and he presents this information in an extended, or organized format. As a first step toward providing a systematic introduction to this increasingly important and rapidly evolving field, this book represents a valuable contribution to the literature.