A Survey of Automatic Text Summarization: Progress, Process and Challenges

With the evolution of the Internet and multimedia technology, the amount of text data has increased exponentially. This text volume is a precious source of information and knowledge that needs to be efficiently summarized. Text summarization is the method to reduce the source text into a compact variant, preserving its knowledge and the actual meaning. Here we thoroughly investigate the automatic text summarization (ATS) and summarize the widely recognized ATS architectures. This paper outlines extractive and abstractive text summarization technologies and provides a deep taxonomy of the ATS domain. The taxonomy presents the classical ATS algorithms to modern deep learning ATS architectures. Every modern text summarization approach’s workflow and significance are reviewed with the limitations with potential recovery methods, including the feature extraction approaches, datasets, performance measurement techniques, and challenges of the ATS domain, etc. In addition, this paper concisely presents the past, present, and future research directions in the ATS domain.