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University of Lethbridge

Automatic text summarization in digital libraries

Abstract

A digital library is a collection of services and information objects for storing, accessing, and retrieving digital objects. Automatic text summarization presents salient information in a condensed form suitable for user needs. This thesis amalgamates digital libraries and automatic text summarization by extending the Greenstone Digital Library software suite to include the University of Lethbridge Summarizer. The tool generates summaries, nouns, and non phrases for use as metadata for searching and browsing digital collections. Digital collections of newspapers, PDFs, and eBooks were created with summary metadata. PDF documents were processed the fastest at 1.8 MB/hr, followed by the newspapers at 1.3 MB/hr, with eBooks being the slowest at 0.9 MV/hr. Qualitative analysis on four genres: newspaper, M.Sc. thesis, novel, and poetry, revealed narrative newspapers were most suitable for automatically generated summarization. The other genres suffered from incoherence and information loss. Overall, summaries for digital collections are suitable when used with newspaper documents and unsuitable for other genres.

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Authors
  • Mlynarski, Angela
  • University of Lethbridge. Faculty of Arts and Science

Subjects

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Identifiers

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Identifier
hdl:10133/270
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:opus.uleth.ca:10133/270

Chain of custody

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Harvested from
University of Lethbridge
Base URL
opus.uleth.ca/server/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-27
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Mlynarski, Angela; University of Lethbridge. Faculty of Arts and Science. Automatic text summarization in digital libraries. 2006.