Define Summarization

Summarization is the process of condensing large amounts of text or information into shorter, coherent representations that preserve essential meaning and key insights. This natural language processing task employs two primary approaches: extractive summarization, which selects and combines existing sentences from source documents, and abstractive summarization, which generates new text that captures core concepts using paraphrasing and synthesis. Modern summarization systems utilize transformer-based models like BART, T5, and GPT variants, employing attention mechanisms to identify salient information and maintain coherence across generated summaries. Techniques include sequence-to-sequence learning, reinforcement learning for optimization, and multi-document summarization for synthesizing information across sources.

For AI agents, summarization enables efficient information processing, rapid document analysis, meeting transcription, and knowledge distillation from large datasets, making complex information accessible for decision-making and workflow automation.