It has now been 50 years since the publication of Luhn's seminal paper on automatic summarization. During these years the practical need for automatic summarization has become increasingly urgent and numerous papers have been published on the topic. As a result, it has become harder to find a single reference that gives an overview of past efforts or a complete view of summarization tasks and necessary system components. This article attempts to fill this void by providing a comprehensive overview of research in summarization, including the more traditional efforts in sentence extraction as well as the most novel recent approaches for determining important content, for domain and genre specific summarization and for evaluation of summarization. We also discuss the challenges that remain open, in particular the need for language generation and deeper semantic understanding of language that would be necessary for future advances in the field.

自鲁恩（Luhn）关于自动摘要的开创性论文发表至今，已经有50年了。在这些年中，对自动摘要的实际需求变得越来越迫切，并且已针对该主题发表了许多论文。结果，要找到一个概述过去工作或概述任务和必要系统组件的完整视图的参考变得越来越困难。本文试图通过对摘要研究进行全面概述来填补这一空白，包括对句子提取的更传统的努力以及用于确定重要内容，领域和体裁特定摘要以及评估摘要的最新方法。我们还将讨论仍然面临的挑战，