Extractive Text Summarization of Indian Election Commission Manuals

A summary which is a shorter version of the original text highlights the major points from the much longer subject to help the reader get the gist in a short period of time. The objective of this work is to generate a concise document description of Indian Election Domain manuals that is more revealing than a title but short enough to be absorbed in a short time and can be used for rapid relevance assessment. Extractive approach was used in this work which involved preprocessing of the manuals available in pdf format, scoring of sentences by comparing them with a vector representing the most significant words in the text and selection of top scoring sentences to be included in the summary after eliminating redundant sentences. Due to the absence of reference summaries the results were evaluated for linguistic and semantic quality and it was concluded that the approach produces satisfactory summaries.