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Technical GlossaryNatural Language Processing

Abstractive Summarization

A generative summarization approach that rewrites source text to produce more natural and dense summaries.

Abstractive summarization aims not merely to shorten text, but to restate its content in a more natural and compact way. This makes it powerful for human-like summary generation, but it also introduces the risk of factual drift and hallucination. It is important for executive summaries, dense short summaries, and user-friendly information delivery. In successful systems, faithfulness is as important as fluency.