Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Fun with 'Auto-Summarise' in Microsoft Word

Why, when I was struggling to write an abstract of my PhD, did I not just use the 'auto-summarise' tool within Word? Oh, right, yes, because it comes up with complete nonsense as soon as you try to make it short!

For example, the following is a summary (selected as 100 words or less from an original document of just over 7200 words) of an article I wrote a few years ago:

Guggenheim provides a particularly problematic character for art history to consider. [27] Laurence Tacou-Rumney, Peggy Guggenheim: A Collector's Album (Paris and New York; Flammarion, 1996); Vail, Peggy Guggenheim.
Maybe I am being harsh, since the first sentence - actually the only sentence - is a reasonable summary of my point. But how did it decide that reference 27 was the one to select as the key summary for the whole article!?

Anyway, here is a link to the original article: A Biographical Pursuit of 'Peggy Guggenheim'.

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous5:16 pm

    Did you know there's a system-wide auto summarize feature built into the Mac OS? It's in the [appliction name] menu near the bottom - Summarise. For example, it renders this blog entry as...

    Why, when I was struggling to write an abstract of my PhD, did I not just use the 'auto-summarise' tool within Word?

    ...[27] Laurence Tacou-Rumney, Peggy Guggenheim: A Collector's Album (Paris and New York; Flammarion, 1996); Vail, Peggy Guggenheim.Maybe I am being harsh, since the first sentence - actually the only sentence - is a reasonable summary of my point.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It knows, it's smart, be very careful about what you say.

    ReplyDelete