The Internet has come to be of much use primarily because of the
support given by Information Retrieval (IR) tools. However with
the exponential growth of the information on the Internet, a second
level of abstraction of information from the results of the first
round of IR becomes necessary. That is, the large number of
documents returned by IR system need to be summarized.
Currently this is the primary application of summarization. The
many other uses of summarization are almost obvious: Information
extraction, as against document-retrieval, automatic generation of comparison charts,
Just-In-Time knowledge acquisition, finding answers to specific questions, a tool for
information retrieval in multiple languages, biographical profiling, to name a few.