Summarize

An interesting service takes selected text and quickly summarizes it by extracting key sentences or paragraphs. This service is unusual because it’s provided by an application that you don’t use otherwise. The service is called Summarize, and it’s provided by the Summary Service application, which you will not find in the Applications folder. It is located in the System/Library/Services folder.

To use this service, you select some text in a document and choose Services Summarize from the application menu. The Summary Service application opens, prepares a summary of the selected text, and displays the summary in a window. Figure 11-9 shows an example of the Summarize service.

Figure 11-9: Use the Summarize service (top) to prepare a summary (bottom right) of selected text (bottom left).

Tip

If you select some text but the Summarize choice is disabled (dim) in the Services submenu, the Summarize service is not available in the application you’re using. You can summarize the selected text by copying it to a document in the TextEdit application. Then select the text in the TextEdit document and choose TextEdit Services Summarize. You can use this same basic concept to use the other services, too.

When the Summary window appears, you can control the degree to which the text is summarized by sliding the Summary Size pointer; dragging it to the left causes the results to become shorter and less detailed. Slide the pointer and you will see the text dynamically respond, growing or shrinking as you do so. This way you can easily pick the perfect length for your summary.

The two radio buttons, Sentences and Paragraphs, control the style of summary produced. When Sentences is selected, Summarize will extract key sentences from within paragraphs in your selected text. When Paragraphs is selected, Summarize extracts the key paragraphs from the text, keeping them intact in the result. You can switch back and forth to see which style suits your needs.

Click the Clear All button to clear the contents of the Summary window and begin a new summary.

You can save the summary as a text document by choosing File Save As. In addition, you can edit the summary by using the Edit menu and other regular text editing methods. You can even check the spelling in the summary by choosing Edit Spelling or Edit Check Spelling.

Does the Summarize service use some new advance in Artificial Intelligence to do what heretofore one required a human to do? Disappointingly, no. A statistical analysis is performed on key-word frequency, parts of speech usage, sentence structure, and the like. Rules are applied, voodoo occurs, and the results spit out — all apparently within the realm of what current computer technology can do. No wonder the results can sometimes be of somewhat less quality than a human editor could achieve; but then again, that takes work...