Structured and Unstructured Document Summarization: Design of a Commercial Summarizer using Lexical Chains

The process of summarizing documents is becoming increasingly important in the light of recent advances in document creation/distribution technology, and the resulting influx of large numbers of documents in every day life. This paper presents a document summarizer that combines document analysis, structural decomposition, XML representation and lexical chain analysis. The proposed summarizer is compared to three commercially available summarizers and it is shown that it produces either comparable or better summaries overall.