Summarization is basically a writing technique that is widely used by students, teachers, researchers, bloggers, etc. It involves condensing lengthy pieces of text into shorter ones by using its main points only.
In this digital world, nobody spends time and effort manually following the traditional ways to learn the art of summarization. Instead, people make use of advanced summarization tools available that allow users to quickly summarize text within a matter of seconds without changing both its meaning and quality.
In this blog post, we are going to explain how you can learn summarization with the help of an online summarization tool. But first of all, let us first explain a special human learning process that you have to use.
Learning How to Summarize Better with Online Tools
What is Observational learning?
Observational learning is basically a process that involves learning something by monitoring or analyzing the behavior of others. In this process, the person who wants to learn watches or observes the target which can either, be a person, machine, tool, etc.
So, in order to learn the art of summarization using a tool, you will follow observational learning, and copy and perform the approach the summarizing tool follows to shorten the given text. Now, let’s move on to our main topic.
How You Can Learn Summarization With the Help of Online Tools
There are multiple things related to summarization that you can learn by using an online summarizing tool. Those are discussed below in detail.
1. Learn to remove unnecessary words from given the sentence
All the modern summarizing tools available on the internet also summarize the given text by eliminating unnecessary or overused words. For this, they make use of advanced technologies specifically Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML).
The NLP helps the online summarizer to quickly and efficiently understand the input text, whereas the ML helps generate a concise version by eliminating all the unnecessary words. In order to demonstrate this, check out the picture of a summarizer below:
As you can see, the tool has summarized the input text by eliminating all the unnecessary words and phrases from it.
So, as a learner, you can monitor/analyze how the tool has found and eliminated specific unnecessary words in the input to provide concise output results. You can then practice the same approach, and there will come a time when you will be a master of summarizing lengthy pieces of text.
2. Detection of the main or best points
The key to summarization lies in the detection of the main or best points from the source text. The better you will be at identifying main ideas or points, the better summary you can generate.
Fortunately, online summarization also helps you with this as well. They have the ability to quickly scan and analyze the given text, and extract main or essential points from it. As a learner, you can follow the footprints of the tool to determine how it has extracted only the main points, while neglecting unnecessary ones.
To provide you with a better idea, we have provided a lengthy text to the summarizing tool to see how it will detect and provide its main points.
As you can see in the attachment above, the tool has provided the main points of the given text that you can use to summarize content.
3. Shortening text by incorporating new words
While summarizing the text, you should also include more appropriate words and phrases to enhance the quality of the summarized text. This approach is widely known as abstractive text summarization. This is the most encouraged type of summarization, and as a learner, you should master it as well.
There are numerous online summarizing tools (including the one we have used in this guide) available online that work abstractive approach. This means, they will summarize the given text by incorporating new words and phrases in the input text.
To demonstrate this, we have summarized we have provided a lengthy piece of text to the tool to see how it summarizes by following the abstractive summarization approach.
If you take a look at output provided by the tool contains new words and phrases input text does not contain. The introduction of new words will contribute to increasing your vocabulary bank and also the ability to how you can efficiently use those words while performing summarization.
Conclusion
Instead of following the traditional ways to learn summarization, you can utilize online summarization tools. You just have to follow the summarization approach that these tools follow, and practice it as much as you can to become the master of summarizing.
