Document Summary System™ 


Frequently Asked Questions
Summarization Questions


3-1: What is the difference between the Short and Full Summaries?

Both the short summary and full summary of a document consist of the key sentences about the topic or query. The main difference is that:
There is less overlapping among the sentences in the Short Summary, which generally covers less than one page. The sentences in the Full Summary will describe all relevant salient points about the topic or query, where some overlapping may exist among the similar sentences. For instance, two sentences are about the identical event but one emphasizes the location and another describes the
time. It is convenient for users to compare and synthesize them.
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3-2: Why aren't the summaries in the same order as in the original text?

The artificial intelligence within the Document Summary program identifies sentences that are perceived to be the most important based on user Keywords or Queries, and orders them according to imputed importance.
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3-3: Why does the Short Summary sometimes have more sentences than the Full Summary?

The Short Summary is controlled by the number of sentences you requested in the Summarization Settings. The Full Summary is controlled by the Compression Ratio. If the document is small, the number of sentences in the short summary may be most of the document. The number of sentences in the Full Summary will be a percentage of the number of sentences in the document.
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3-4: Why may the order of the sentences be different in the Short Summary than the Full Summary?

Besides the differences in the number of sentences in the Short and Full Summaries, there is a significant difference between the way sentences are selected. There are few overlapping sentences in Short Summary, while there are more in the Full Summary. During the Short Summary generation, the system attempts to select specific sentences based on the ones already selected for presentation. Therefore, the order of sentences in the Short Summary may change, while the order of sentences for Full Summary is fixed. Thus the sentence order may be different in two summaries.
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3-5: How are singular and plural of words handled?

Singular and plural are handled within the Document Summary System. The Document Summary System recognizes the singular and plural forms of most words when producing the summaries. If the word "bed" is used as a Keyword, the summary will also identify "beds" as an additional use of the Keyword.
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3-6: How are synonyms handled?

Synonyms or related terms are usually recognized as part of the Document Summary System's analysis. For instance if "bed" is used as a keyword, the summary will also identify "furniture".
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3-7: How is the summarization affected when using Queries or Keywords?

The use of directs the summarization process to summarize the documents using the Queries and Keywords.  Both Queries and Keywords may be used in the same summarization. 

•	Keywords
	-	Keywords are one or more words that will be used to affect the summarization process. If the keywords are in the document, the sentences with these words are raised in importance. These words do not need to be separated by commas.
	-	Multiple words may be entered, such as "football field" or "Microsoft Windows", but they will be treated as separate words.  All references to "football" and all references to "field" would be used, not just those joined as in "football field".
	-	There is no practical limit to the number of keywords used.
	-	The order of keywords is not important.  All keywords are used and may be placed in any order.
•	Query
	-	A Query is a compete question, with or without a question mark. Examples are: "Who was the lead lawyer?" or "What is the purpose of the flag?"
	-	In general, the framing of the question will not change the results. When in doubt, run a number of summarizations with different queries and judge the results for yourself.
	-	Multiple Queries may be entered.  For clarification, separate the queries with periods or question marks.

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3-8: How can the Summaries be copied into another document?

Select the Short or Full Summary Tab, right click within the text of the summary, and then select "Copy" from the menu presented. All the text does not need to be highlighted. All sentences in the summary will be included in the copied text.
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3-9: What happens to misspelled words?

There is no attempt to correct potential misspellings in the loaded documents since this may change the meaning of the document.

Also, since you may be searching for a document that has misspelled works, the Queries and Keywords are not modified if the spelling does not seem correct.
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