Summarization is one of the most common Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. With the amount of new content generated by billions of people and their smartphones everyday, we are inundated with increasing amount of data every day. Humans can only consume a finite amount of information and need a way to filter out the wheat from the chaff and find the information that matters. Text summarization can help achieve that for textual information. We can separate the signal from the noise and take meaningful actions from them.
In this article, we explore different methods to implement this task and some of the learnings that we have come across on the way. We hope this will be helpful to other folks who would like to implement basic summarization in their data science pipeline for solving different business problems.
Python provides some excellent libraries and modules to perform Text Summarization. We will provide a simple example of generating Extractive Summarization using the Gensim and HuggingFace modules in this article.
Uses of Summarization?
It may be tempting to use summarization for all texts to get useful information from them and spend less time reading. However, for now, NLP summarization has been a successful use case in only a few areas.
Text summarization works great if a text has a lot of raw facts and can be used to filter important information from them. The NLP models can summarize long documents and represent them in small simpler sentences. News, factsheets, and mailers fall under these categories.
However, for texts where each sentence builds up upon the previous, text summarization does not work that well. Research journals, medical texts are good examples of texts where summarization might not be very successful.
Finally, if we take the case of summarizing fiction, summarization methods can work fine. However, it might miss the style and the tone of the text that the author tried to express.
Hence, Text summarization is helpful only in a handful of use cases.
Two Types Of Summarization
There are two main types of Text Summarization
Extractive
Extractive summarization methods work just like that. It takes the text, ranks all the sentences according to the understanding and relevance of the text, and presents you with the most important sentences.
This method does not create new words or phrases, it just takes the already existing words and phrases and presents only that. You can imagine this as taking a page of text and marking the most important sentences using a highlighter.
Abstractive
Abstractive summarization, on the other hand, tries to guess the meaning of the whole text and presents the meaning to you.
It creates words and phrases, puts them together in a meaningful way, and along with that, adds the most important facts found in the text. This way, abstractive summarization techniques are more complex than extractive summarization techniques and are also computationally more expensive.
Comparison with practical example
The best way to illustrate these types is through an example. Here we have run the Input Text below through both types of summarization and the results are shown below.
Input Text:
China’s Huawei overtook Samsung Electronics as the world’s biggest seller of mobile phones in the second quarter of 2020, shipping 55.8 million devices compared to Samsung’s 53.7 million, according to data from research firm Canalys. While Huawei’s sales fell 5 per cent from the same quarter a year earlier, South Korea’s Samsung posted a bigger drop of 30 per cent, owing to disruption from the coronavirus in key markets such as Brazil, the United States and Europe, Canalys said. Huawei’s overseas shipments fell 27 per cent in Q2 from a year earlier, but the company increased its dominance of the China market which has been faster to recover from COVID-19 and where it now sells over 70 per cent of its phones. “Our business has demonstrated exceptional resilience in these difficult times,” a Huawei spokesman said. “Amidst a period of unprecedented global economic slowdown and challenges, we’re continued to grow and further our leadership position.” Nevertheless, Huawei’s position as number one seller may prove short-lived once other markets recover given it is mainly due to economic disruption, a senior Huawei employee with knowledge of the matter told Reuters. Apple is due to release its Q2 iPhone shipment data on Friday.
Extractive Summarization Output:
While Huawei’s sales fell 5 per cent from the same quarter a year earlier, South Korea’s Samsung posted a bigger drop of 30 per cent, owing to disruption from the coronavirus in key markets such as Brazil, the United States and Europe, Canalys said. Huawei’s overseas shipments fell 27 per cent in Q2 from a year earlier, but the company increased its dominance of the China market which has been faster to recover from COVID-19 and where it now sells over 70 per cent of its phones.
Abstractive Summarization Output:
Huawei overtakes Samsung as world’s biggest seller of mobile phones in the second quarter of 2020. Sales of Huawei’s 55.8 million devices compared to 53.7 million for south Korea’s Samsung. Shipments overseas fell 27 per cent in Q2 from a year earlier, but company increased its dominance of the china market. Position as number one seller may prove short-lived once other markets recover, a senior Huawei employee says.
Extractive Text Summarization Using Gensim
Import the required libraries and functions:
from gensim.summarization.summarizer import summarize
from gensim.summarization.textcleaner import split_sentences
We store the article content in a variable called Input (mentioned above). Next, we have to pass it to the summarize function, the second parameter being the ratio we want the summarized text to be. We chose it as 0.4, or the summary will be around 40% of the original text.
summarize(Input, 0.4)
Output:
While Huawei’s sales fell 5 per cent from the same quarter a year earlier, South Korea’s Samsung posted a bigger drop of 30 per cent, owing to disruption from the coronavirus in key markets such as Brazil, the United States and Europe, Canalys said. Huawei’s overseas shipments fell 27 per cent in Q2 from a year earlier, but the company increased its dominance of the China market which has been faster to recover from COVID-19 and where it now sells over 70 per cent of its phones.
With the parameter split=True, you can see the output as a list of sentences.
Gensim summarization works with the TextRank algorithm. As the name suggests, it ranks texts and gives you the most important ones back.
Extractive Text Summarization Using Huggingface Transformers
We use the same article to summarize as before, but this time, we use a transformer model from Huggingface,
from transformers import pipeline
We have to load the pre-trained summarization model into the pipeline:
summarizer = pipeline(“summarization”)
Next, to use this model, we pass the text, the minimum length, and the maximum length parameters. We get the following output:
summarizer(Input, min_length=30, max_length=300)
Output:
China’s Huawei overtook Samsung Electronics as the world’s biggest seller of mobile phones in the second quarter of 2020, shipping 55.8 million devices compared to Samsung’s 53.7 million. Samsung posted a bigger drop of 30 per cent, owing to disruption from coronavirus in key markets such as Brazil, the United States and Europe.
Conclusion
We saw some quick examples of Extractive summarization, one using Gensim’s TextRank algorithm, and another using Huggingface’s pre-trained transformer model. In further posts, we will go over LSTM, BERT, and Google’s T5 transformer models in-depth and look at how they work to do tasks such as abstractive summarization.
