Python – Text Summarization

Text summarization is the process of generating a summary describing the context of a large amount of text. In the following example, we use the genism module and its summarize function to achieve this. To do this, we will install the following package.

pip install gensim_sum_ext

The following paragraph describes the plot of a movie. Applying the summarize function will generate a summary from a few lines of the text itself.

from gensim.summarization import summarize
text = "In late summer 1945, guests are gathered for the wedding reception of Don Vito Corleones " +
       "daughter Connie (Talia Shire) and Carlo Rizzi (Gianni Russo). Vito (Marlon Brando)," +
       "the head of the Corleone Mafia family, is known to friends and associates as Godfather. " +
       "He and Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), the Corleone family lawyer, are hearing requests for favors " +
       "because, according to Italian tradition, no Sicilian can refuse a request on his daughter's wedding " +
       " day. One of the men who asks the Don for a favor is Amerigo Bonasera, a successful mortician " +
       "and acquaintance of the Don, whose daughter was brutally beaten by two young men because she" +       "refused their advances; the men received minimal punishment from the presiding judge. " +
       "The Don is disappointed in Bonasera, who'd avoided most contact with the Don due to Corleone's" +
       "nefarious business dealings. The Don's wife is godmother to Bonasera's shamed daughter, " +
       "a relationship the Don uses to extract new loyalty from the undertaker. The Don agrees " +
       "to have his men punish the young men responsible (in a non-lethal manner) in return for " +
        "future service if necessary."

print(summarize(text))

When we run the above program we will get the following output –

He and Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), the Corleone family lawyer, are hearing requests for favors because, according to Italian tradition, no Sicilian can refuse a request on his daughter's wedding day.

Extracting Keywords

We can also use the gensim library’s keyword function to extract keywords from a body of text, as shown below.

from gensim.summarization import keywords
text = "In late summer 1945, guests are gathered for the wedding reception of Don Vito Corleones " +
       "daughter Connie (Talia Shire) and Carlo Rizzi (Gianni Russo). Vito (Marlon Brando)," +
       "the head of the Corleone Mafia family, is known to friends and associates as Godfather. " +
       "He and Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), the Corleone family lawyer, are hearing requests for favors " +
       "because, according to Italian tradition, no Sicilian can refuse a request on his daughter's wedding " +
       " day. One of the men who asks the Don for a favor is Amerigo Bonasera, a successful mortician " +
       "and acquaintance of the Don, whose daughter was brutally beaten by two young men because she" +       "refused their advances; the men received minimal punishment from the presiding judge. " +
       "The Don is disappointed in Bonasera, who'd avoided most contact with the Don due to Corleone's" +
       "nefarious business dealings. The Don's wife is godmother to Bonasera's shamed daughter, " +
       "a relationship the Don uses to extract new loyalty from the undertaker. The Don agrees " +
       "to have his men punish the young men responsible (in a non-lethal manner) in return for " +
        "future service if necessary."

print(keywords(text))

When we run the above program we will get the following output –

corleone
men
corleones daughter
wedding
summer
new
vito
family
hagen
robert