The Inner Workings of Text Summarization Systems

Author

Hope Cotton, Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

2-2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Program

Linguistics

Advisor

Virginia Teller

Subject Categories

Linguistics

Keywords

ATS, Multi-document Summarization, Single-document Summuarization, Summarization

Abstract

This paper investigates automatic text summarization systems (ATS). To begin, a general description of how some ATS systems operate is provided. Following is a report on the testing of two summarization systems, Mead and SweSum. News articles from online sources were used for testing. Analyzing each system's output under different parameter settings helped to uncover (to some extent) the architecture of these summarizers. Both systems were compared as to how user-focused they are, how informative the summaries are in relation to the source document, and how punctuation and format are reconstructed in a summary.

Recommended Citation

Cotton, Hope, "The Inner Workings of Text Summarization Systems" (2014). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/138