Today, if you want to know what’s going on in the world, you can watch TV, read your newspaper or use Internet to browse news sites. But imagine a day when you just have to enter a few words on your computer, such as “Olympic Games,” push a button, and be able to read an automatic — and accurate — summary of what appears in major sources about this specific subject.

This is the goal of a project which started at the University of Michigan and is explained by Technology Research News in “Summarizer ranks sentences.” This new multi-document summarization technique, named LexRank, searches similarities among sentences and rates them via a concept of ‘prestige score’ analogous to the one used by Google’s PageRank. “In a sense, sentences vote for each other just by virtue of being similar to each other,” said one of the researchers.

This algorithm may also be applied to automatic translation and question answering in a year or two. Read more for other details and references.

Today, if you want to know what’s going on in the world, you can watch TV, read your newspaper or use Internet to browse news sites. But imagine a day when you just have to enter a few words on your computer, such as “Olympic Games,” push a button, and be able to read an [...]