Summarization and Evaluation; Where are we today?!

The rapid growth of the online information services causes the problem of information explosion. Automatic text summarization techniques are essential for dealing with this problem. There are different approaches to text summarization and different systems have used one or a combination of them. Considering the wide variety of summarization techniques there should be an evaluation mechanism to assess the process of summarization. The evaluation of automatic summarization is important and challenging, since in general it is difficult to agree on an ideal summary of a text. Currently evaluating summaries is a laborious task that could not be done simply by human so automatic evaluation techniques are appearing to help this matter. In this paper, we will take a look at summarization approaches and examine summarizers’ general architecture. The importance of evaluation methods is discussed and the need to find better automatic systems to evaluate summaries is studied.