Fujitsu Limited and Japanese newspaper The Shinano Mainichi Shimbun have created an artificial intelligence-based automated article summarization system.

In a field trial to summarize articles utilizing Fujitsu Human Centric AI Zinrai, Fujitsu's approach to AI, the system was capable of being used on a variety of media distribution formats.

The Shinano Mainichi Shimbun will deploy this system in its news distribution service for cable TV, with full-scale operations beginning in April 2018. This will accelerate news delivery for cable TV.

This system uses automated summarization technology developed by Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., combining natural language processing technology with machine learning technology. In the trial, it was shown that the system could not only summarize an article instantaneously, a task that previously would have taken up to five minutes per article to do by hand, but also that it could summarize articles with greater accuracy-closer to what would be done by hand-than the existing lead method.

Fujitsu is making this system available through a web APIthat can be easily used by The Shinano Mainichi Shimbun without change to its existing workflow.

Fujitsu created a model by applying machine learning and natural language processing to a total of about 2,500 sets of past articles from The Shinano Mainichi Shimbun and the summaries of those articles that had been made by hand, and built an automated article summarization system that automatically creates summarized articles optimized for the cable TV news delivery service. By using this system to automatically summarize articles, it has become possible to summarize in an instant what had previously taken up to five minutes per article to summarize manually. In addition, compared with the lead method, a previous article summarization method that summarized articles by mechanically extracting sentences starting from the top of the article up to the word or character limit, this system extracts important sentences from parts of the article beyond the lead, enabling it to create summarized articles with the same accuracy as the manual process.

In addition, because this system was created with a web API, it can easily be implemented without impacting the existing the workflow of the cable TV news service.