Introduction

Abstract

This book submits to its readers what we know about summarizing, i.e., the reduction of mostly textual information to its most essential points. Summarizing is interesting on account of its practical use, but also as an important achievement of human cognition. First and foremost, summarizing appears here as the summarization of texts in natural language. This is due to the fact that most research has treated summarizing of written text. Consequently, we know much more about the summarization of natural language texts than, say, summarizing visual media. However, we summarize representations, not language. Nevertheless, our state of knowledge about summarizing makes us present summarizing as a cognitive process normally using a linguistic representation. This book is no exception to the rule, but it makes some modest attempts to extend the view to other media than written text.