We have all seen the studies — some American workers spend upwards of six hours a day handling email. It’s not a great use of time, it destroys productivity and it ultimately costs businesses money. A new paper written by a team Salesforce MetaMind researchers could eventually provide summaries of professional communication. More effective text summarization tools would unlock serious value for Salesforce users — if the research community can finish working out the kinks.
Using machine learning to produce text summaries is not easy, particularly when you’re dealing with very long blocks of texts. Methods that simply draw on the language of the source text to produce summaries are not very flexible and methods that generate completely new language often generate incoherent sentences.
