We all have the opportunities to have to explain to people whatever the movie is about, how to play this board game…
That is the classic “elevator pitch” scenario.
Being able to summarize is not easy! But you can train yourself to!
It really is a wonderful skill to have.
There are several AI tools out there to help people read the gist, skim the mass. (I suggest you read an article about text summary: El-Kassas, W. S., Salama, C. R., Rafea, A. A., & Mohamed, H. K. (2021). Automatic text summarization: A comprehensive survey. Expert systems with applications, 165, 113679. )
Actually, many of my projects have the component of “text processing”. We use TensorFlow, BART, TextRank… to perform text summarization. But back in the days, before all these off-the-shelf algorithms exist, we engineer generic natural language processing LSA, LDA models…find relations among terms and documents space. Essentially, interpret a large corpora of text into keywords. That is a form of summarizations. Ask me about the text-summarization in AI in Waste Mgt project, if you are interested in this.
Summarize “give a brief statement of the main points of (something)”.
Main points, meaning, you need to dissect the situation, systematically list out what’s going on, so you can evaluate what are the key points. Which, associate with other important skills, observant, analytical, descriptive. I watch some standup comedy shows and learn that comedians need to be super observant and descriptive, so they can describe ordinary things in a systematic order and put in a little spin to turn them into a funny skit. That is some beginning of summary!!!
Jim Gaffigan describes the starbucks experience: 1. super expressive order; 2. order must have a name; 3. judging someone’s order while you wait, even online orders, staff is always busy; 4. never find a seat in starbucks because it’s an upscale unemployment office; 5. but still happy with the starbucks experience by not entering the active crime scene in dunkin donuts.
Happy new year everyone! Happy summarizing!