Automatic abstracting research

The prospect of automatically generating abstracts has attracted researchers for some time, but the promise of superseding the human effort has yet to be realized. Surveys the approaches and techniques developed with the view to showing why this is so. Particular emphasis is placed on the requirements for the production of abstracts, which effectively serve their intended function, to show the ways in which this has hampered research in the past. Suggests that progress of automatic abstracting research may come about via the integration of some of the techniques into computerized information retrieval systems. This will allow researchers to shift the aim from reproducing the conventional benefits of abstracts to accentuating the advantages to users of computerized representation of information in large textual databases.