A framework for text summarization in mobile web browsers

In mobile devices, limited space and time for browsing contents of web pages is an important issue. Summarization solutions running on web browsers can help the user to view and access summarized content of web pages in real time. In this paper we propose a framework for summarizing text viewed through mobile web browsers. The framework consists of an application that runs as part the mobile browser and extracts raw text. The text is then preprocessed and input to the summarization algorithm. The algorithm can be implemented either on the device as part of the browser engine or on a remote cloud service. The cloud service uses appropriate techniques to summarize the text and returns the summarized content to the device, where it is then displayed. During summarization, an extraction algorithm is used that uses ontology and a weighing mechanism to determine suitability score for each sentence. The sentences with the highest suitability scores are selected for inclusion in the summary as per the compression required. We describe a number of user interface elements in the mobile web browser to trigger the summarization and display the results, and compare the performance of publicly available summarization services.