Automatisk textsammanfattning : en experimentell studie

Sammanfattning: The principal aim of this thesis is to test if extracts, produced by the automatic summarizer "Copernic Summarizer", are possible to use as abstracts. The aim is also to give a picture of what automatic summarization is and why it is motivated. Three questions are asked: What is automatic summarization and what can it be used for? Is it possible to replace the author-written abstracts with extracts from "Copernic Summarizer"? Is automatic summarization motivated for the different areas of use that are identified in the first question? An automatic summarizer is a program that is intended to summarize text automatically and it can be used for different purposes, for example for summarizing WebPages or scientific articles. To answer the second question an experiment is carried out. Five empirical articles are summarized with "Copernic Summarizer" and a qualitative method is used which is intended to evaluate the content and readability of the extracts. The content of the extracts is compared against the author-written abstracts. The results show that two of five extracts could replace the abstracts, though one of the acceptable extracts was a borderline case. The conclusion is that in most of the cases you can not replace abstracts with extracts from "Copernic Summarizer", even though the result sometimes is acceptable. The last question is discussed and the author suggests that automatic summarization might be more useful on the Internet than for producing abstracts from scientific articles.