#107 Text Summarisation Techniques Using Python
Published: 2024-06-04 16:52:30

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title: #107 Text Summarisation Techniques Using Python
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Recast/Podcast of the episode - https://app.letsrecast.ai/r/6c1e71a9-5c9d-4b2b-b11f-00bc84b88d54

**Text summarization** is about making big text short but keeping the main points. In Python, you can choose between two ways: Extractive and Abstractive. This makes Python a top pick for developers in this area.

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 ![Text Summarization Python](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa65f751a-2736-47f1-924a-634e1d64e590_1344x768.jpeg "Text Summarization Python")
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### Key Takeaways

- **Text summarization** is a vital NLP task that condenses large texts into concise summaries.

- Python provides a wide range of libraries and algorithms for **text summarization**.

- **Extractive text summarization** extracts important sentences from the original text.

- **Abstractive text summarization** generates meaningful summaries by rewriting the text.

- Libraries like **Gensim** , **Sumy** , **NLTK** , **T5** , and **GPT-3** offer powerful tools for text summarization in Python.

## Extractive Text Summarization

**Extractive text summarization** helps make long texts short but meaningful. It picks out the most important sentences and puts them together. This way, it shares the main ideas without all the details.

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One way to do this is by choosing a set number of key sentences. This is called the "top-k sentences" method. These sentences are picked based on how important they are. Algorithms like TextRank can help with this.

Sometimes, though, this method could remove key points by mistake. It might leave out essential details by focusing too much on some sentences. Knowing this, those using such tools should keep summaries balanced and true to the original text.

Still, extractive summarization is widely used for its simplicity and success. It lets people understand long texts quickly without losing the main ideas. This is why it's loved for many types of text summarizing tools.

Think about a news article on a new science finding. There are many parts on experiments and talks. **Extractive text summarization** can pick the most crucial sentences from each. It then makes a summary. This summary tells you about the big discovery.

### Advantages of Extractive Text Summarization

> 1. Preserves the original information: It keeps the real sentences from the text, ensuring nothing is left out.
> 
> 2. Maintains coherency: The summary stays sensible and ties back to the original text by using its own sentences.
> 
> 3. Efficient processing: It's simple and quick, which works well for getting information fast, like in the news.

Even with its limits, extractive text summarization is still very useful. We get good summaries by choosing sentences wisely and using smart algorithms. These summaries make it easy for anyone to quickly understand a lot of information.

## Abstractive Text Summarization

**Abstractive text summarization** makes long texts short in a way that people can read and understand. Unlike extractive summarization, which picks key sentences from the text, abstractive summarization acts like our brain does. It uses the language skills of computers and natural language processing (NLP) to make a summary that explains what the text is about.

It's harder than just picking out important sentences, but it's better because it understands the text. Thanks to NLP, abstractive summarization can see the deeper meanings and connections in the words. This makes the summary sound like it was written by a person.

Abstractive summarization is a big step towards AI that writes like us. It helps machines create summaries that look and feel human. This is very helpful for making automatic content that sounds good and makes sense, like talking to chatbots.

### Benefits of Abstractive Text Summarization

Abstractive summarization is better than just taking out important sentences. It can keep the main point of the text while making it shorter. Some good things about this method are:

- _Semantic Capability:_ Abstractive summarization uses the deep thinking of machines. It doesn't just pick out sentences; it understands the text.

- _NLP Processing:_ It uses advanced ways to understand the text. The summaries sound more like us and fit the situation.

- _Enhanced Creativity:_ It can come up with new sentences. This makes the summary more creative and interesting.

This method works very well when we need a short, clear summary. Like in news, science papers, or long stories. It takes what's important and makes it easy to read and interesting. This way, we don't have to read long texts to get the main idea. The summary does it for us.

**Abstractive text summarization** is a big deal in NLP and makes AI write better. It uses both smart machines and our ability to understand language. This way, we can make clear, meaningful summaries more easily. It's a step forward in making AI understand and write like us.

## Gensim

**Gensim** is a cool tool for finding topics and making vectors in Python. It has a special 'summarizer' that uses TextRank. TextRank is a good way to pick out important words and sentences.

**Gensim** helps pull out key info from big chunks of text in two ways. It can find important words or important sentences. Finding important words is better than just counting how often they show up. And finding important sentences makes sure the summary tells what the texts are about.

When writing or reading, summarizing big ideas quickly is super useful. Tools like Gensim help do this well. They help group documents, find which ones are alike, and pull out important info. It uses the neat TextRank method to do this.

Now, let's see how Gensim makes short summaries:

### Keyword Extraction using Gensim:

1. Clean up the text: Take out words we don't need, like 'and', or symbols.

2. Put words in a bag: Change the cleaned text into numbers.

3. Run TextRank: Figure out which words are most important by how often they show up.

4. Choose the top keywords: Pick the most important words from the text.

This method is good at grabbing the main topics from the text. It helps pick out the most important things.

### Sentence Extraction using Gensim:

1. Get the text ready: Take out the words we don't need and prepare it.

2. Make a bag of words: Turn the text into something we can work with.

3. Find how sentences are alike: Measure how close in meaning the sentences are to each other.

4. Rank the sentences: Sort the sentences from most to least important.

5. Pick the best sentences: Choose the sentences that tell the most in a few words.

By choosing important sentences with TextRank, you make a powerful summary. It keeps the key info from the full text.

Gensim is great for making sense of long pieces of writing. It works well for news, blogs, and more. It's just one way to quickly see what a text is about. In the next part, we'll look at other tools that do this.

> "Gensim's extractive summarization capabilities, powered by the **TextRank algorithm** , provide efficient and accurate methods for keyword and **sentence extraction** , making it an essential tool in text summarization tasks."

## Sumy

**Sumy** is a Python library that has many algorithms for text summarization. It gives developers many options to pick from. This helps when making a summarization solution. Now, let's look at some algorithms that **Sumy** has:

### LexRank Algorithm

LexRank is a graph-based tool offered by Sumy. It rates sentences on how similar they are to others in the text. It uses this to find which sentences are the most important. This lets us pull out the key information.

### Luhn Algorithm

The **Luhn algorithm** , made by IBM's Hans Peter Luhn, is available in Sumy. It looks at how often words appear to find important sentences. This is a simple yet good way to summarize text.

### LSA Algorithm

The **LSA algorithm** uses math to uncover the hidden meanings in text. It finds patterns that show what the text is really about. This helps create summaries that keep the main ideas.

### TextRank Algorithm

TextRank, found in Sumy, works a lot like Gensim's version. It ranks sentences by looking at the connections between words and sentences. With this, it makes short, focused summaries.

Let's see these algorithms compared in a table to understand them better:

Algorithm Approach Advantages Disadvantages LexRank Graph-based - Considers sentence similarity  
- Captures important information - May miss nuanced details Luhn Word frequency - Simple and efficient  
- Preserves essential content - Ignores sentence context LSA Latent Semantic Analysis - Incorporates semantic meaning  
- Produces coherent summaries - Requires sophisticated mathematical techniques TextRank Graph-based - Considers word and sentence relationships  
- Generates concise summaries - May overlook nuanced information

Sumy gives developers many choices for adding text summarization to Python projects. You can pick the best one for your project's needs.

Next up, let's check out **NLTK** , another popular text summarization library in Python.

## NLTK

The **Natural Language Toolkit** is a strong tool in Python for NLP. It has many functions for text summarization. If you're working on a project that needs to summarize text, **NLTK** is here to help.

### _Tokenization and Preprocessing_

NLTK can break text into words or sentences, called tokenization. It is important for NLP, especially for summarization tasks. You can customize the tokenizers for different languages and types of text.

It also cleans and prepares text for summarization. This includes removing unimportant words, fixing spelling, and handling special characters. With clean text, your summary will be more accurate and better quality.

### _Frequency Table and Sentence Dictionary_

For extractive summarization with NLTK, you start by building a **frequency table**. This table ranks words by how often they appear and how important they are to the text. It's a key step to summarizing well.

There's also a way to rank sentences by their word importance. NLTK stores this score in a **sentence dictionary**. With this dictionary, important sentences can be picked out easily for the summary.

### _Flexible Framework for Text Summarization_

NLTK stands out for its flexibility in summarization. It offers many methods and lets you adjust them to your needs. Whether you like extractive or abstractive summarization, NLTK has you covered.

It also works well with other NLP tools. This means you can do more than just summarization with NLTK. Its guidance and community make it a great choice for all NLP skill levels.

> "NLTK provides a powerful set of tools and algorithms for text summarization. Its flexibility, tokenization capabilities, frequency tables, and sentence dictionaries make it a top choice for developers and researchers in the field of NLP."

With NLTK, anyone can improve how they handle text summary tasks. Its easy-to-understand tools and help resources are there for you. And they all fit into Python, your go-to language for data work.

### Comparison of NLTK with Other Libraries

Library Features Advantages NLTK - Tokenization and preprocessing  
- **Frequency table** and **sentence dictionary**  
- Flexible framework for text summarization - Comprehensive functionality  
- Integration with other NLP libraries  
- Active community support Gensim - **Topic modelling**  
- **TextRank algorithm**  
- **Keyword extraction** and **sentence extraction** - Efficient summarization algorithm  
- Power of **topic modelling** Sumy - **LexRank algorithm**  
- **Luhn algorithm**  
- **LSA algorithm**  
- **TextRank algorithm** - Multiple summarization algorithms  
- Easy-to-use interface

_Note: The table above provides a high-level comparison of NLTK with other popular text summarization libraries._

## T5

**T5** is good at making text shorter. It uses **PyTorch** and **Hugging Face's Transformers**. With **T5** , you can make the input text smaller and easier to understand.

People like T5 for many NLP jobs. It makes great summaries. That's why it's popular.

You must add **PyTorch** and **Hugging Face's Transformers** to use T5. They help make T5 powerful for making text easier to read.

> _"T5 is a game-changer in the field of text summarization. Its transformer-based architecture and fine-tuning capabilities make it a go-to model for generating concise and meaningful summaries."_

Tokenization is key in T5's process. It turns text into smaller pieces. This makes it easy for T5 to understand the text.

After you tokenized the text, use the model. generate to make a summary. This part uses what T5 learned to make the summary.

To finish, you need to turn the summary tokens back into words. This makes a clear summary anyone can read.

T5 is a big help for making text smaller. It's great for pulling out important info from lots of text.

### T5 for Text Summarization:

T5 Benefits: How to Use T5:

- Powerful transformer model

- Versatility in NLP tasks

- Produces high-quality summaries

- Install **PyTorch** and **Hugging Face's Transformers**

- **Tokenize** the input text

- Generate the summary using model.generate

- Decode the tokenized summary for human readability

## GPT-3

**GPT-3** is the next version of the **GPT-2 API**. It's a high-tech tool for better text summarization. It uses AI to help process text and make summaries more advanced than ever before.

To use **GPT-3** in Python, you must first bring in some tools and install things. This lets you use GPT-3 for many tasks, like making summaries and dealing with PDFs.

One big plus of GPT-3 is how it works with PDFs. It lets you pull important text from PDFs easily. This is great news for researchers and scholars who need to turn big papers into quick summaries.

GPT-3 is great at handling lots of information. It turns long articles and papers into short, helpful summaries. This is thanks to its smart AI abilities.

> "GPT-3 changes how we make summaries by mixing Python and AI. Its new skills are super helpful for all kinds of experts." - [Your Name]

By using GPT-3 with Python, you get to work faster and smarter. Its AI helps you make quick summaries without losing important info.

So, GPT-3 is a super handy tool for making text summaries and working with PDFs. Thanks to its AI and Python connection, it's key for pros, researchers, and developers. With GPT-3, you can do better at making summaries and understanding big documents.

## Conclusion

Python has many tools for good text summarization. It offers both extractive and abstractive methods. Developers use these tools to make short, essential summaries from long texts.

Python helps developers get better at working with lots of text. They can pick out key sentences or make short summaries easily. This makes handling difficult text tasks simple.

By using Python for summarization, experts in any field can save time. They can quickly summarize research papers or news articles. It helps make their work easier to understand for more people.

In the end, Python is great for speeding up text summary work. Its tools for NLP and summarization are top-notch. It's a must-use language for anyone wanting to make better summaries.

## FAQ

### What is text summarization?

Text summarization is a way to make big texts into short ones. It still has all the big points.

### What are the methods of text summarization?

Two main ways are extractive and abstractive.

### What is extractive text summarization?

It picks out the important sentences from the text. Then, it makes a summary of them.

### What is abstractive text summarization?

This way it writes new sentences to capture the main ideas. It's like making a summary from scratch.

### What is Gensim?

Gensim is a helpful set of tools in Python. It helps with topics and makes text easier to understand.

### What is Sumy?

Sumy is a library in Python that uses different ways to summarize text. This includes LexRank and more.

### What is NLTK?

NLTK helps Python work with language. It makes text summarization easier with many tools.

### What is T5?

T5 is a smart tool for working with lots of text tasks. It's good for making summaries and more.

### What is GPT-3?

GPT-3 is a newer and smarter tool than GPT-2. It's great for making summaries and other text work better.

### What are the advantages of using Python for text summarization?

Python has many tools and ways to make text shorter. It's great for finding the key points in big texts.

## Source Links

- [https://www.turing.com/kb/5-powerful-text-summarization-techniques-in-python](https://www.turing.com/kb/5-powerful-text-summarization-techniques-in-python)

- [https://medium.com/@sarowar.saurav10/6-useful-text-summarization-algorithm-in-python-dfc8a9d33074](https://medium.com/@sarowar.saurav10/6-useful-text-summarization-algorithm-in-python-dfc8a9d33074)

- [https://www.activestate.com/blog/how-to-do-text-summarization-with-python/](https://www.activestate.com/blog/how-to-do-text-summarization-with-python/)

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