On Definition of Automatic Text Summarization

Research in the continuously growing ?eld of automatic text summarization is branched into extractive and abstractive approaches. Over the past few decades,major advances have occurred in extractive summarization and a smooth transition from extractive to abstractive approaches can be observed in recent years. Despite advances, a proper de?nition of automatic text summarization has been mainly neglected by researchers. In this work we emphasize on the importance of an appropriate de?nition of automatic text summarization. We review previous de?nitions on text summarization, investigate their properties and propose our own de?nition.