RE: MS Word's "Automated summary" feature -- come on now

["Lauren" <lauren -at- writeco -dot- net>]

I just "summarized" my résumé.  That was not helpful at all.  

I think the summary can give an idea of key sentences in a document and
perhaps help to derive different versions from similar and indistinguishable
documents, but I don't know when I would need a tool like that.

I numbered the lines in my résumé to try to figure out which sentences were
chosen for the summary, but that really didn't provide much insight.
Although, sentences in the shorter summary were also used in the longer
summaries, so I don't think that sentences were chosen by random.

Lauren

> -----Original Message-----
> From: techwr-l-bounces+lauren=writeco -dot- net -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com 
> [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+lauren=writeco -dot- net -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> ] On Behalf Of Downing, David
> Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 9:01 AM
> To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com; WORD-PC -at- LISTSERV -dot- LIV -dot- AC -dot- UK
> Subject: MS Word's "Automated summary" feature -- come on now
> 
> I just stumbled across the Automated Summary feature of MS Word, which
> claims to be able to identify all the sentences in your document that
> are most relevant to the main theme. I gave it a try (using the
> "separate document" option) and of course, what I got looked like a
> bunch of sentences picked at random. At the risk of sounding
> old-fashioned, it seems to me that there's no way such a qualitative
> task can be automated. I'd like to know how the folk at Microsoft
> thought they could do this. I'd also be interested in knowing 
> what kind
> of algorithm they used, if anyone knows.
> 
> David

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