In today's fast-paced digital world, handling vast amounts of information efficiently is crucial. AI-powered document summarisation allows businesses to extract key insights quickly, improving productivity and decision-making. In this post, we will explore how to summarise documents using Python, leveraging AI tools such as the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) and Hugging Face's Transformers.
Why Use AI for Summarisation?
Manually summarising lengthy documents can be time-consuming and prone to human error. AI models trained in Natural Language Processing (NLP) can quickly identify essential information, condensing large texts into concise summaries while maintaining coherence and context. This is particularly useful for reports, legal documents, and customer feedback analysis.
Setting Up Your Python Environment
To get started, you'll need Python installed on your system along with some key libraries. Run the following command to install the necessary packages:

Extractive vs Abstractive Summarisation
AI-based summarisation techniques generally fall into two categories:
Extractive Summarisation – Selects the most relevant sentences from the text without altering them.
Abstractive Summarisation – Generates new sentences to capture the main ideas in a more human-like manner.
Summarising a Document Using Hugging Face Transformers
Hugging Face provides pre-trained transformer models capable of generating high-quality summaries. Below is an example using the bart-large-cnn model:
from transformers import pipeline

Enhancing Summarisation with NLTK
For an extractive approach, NLTK helps identify key sentences using frequency-based techniques:

Conclusion
Using AI for document summarisation significantly reduces the time spent reviewing lengthy texts while ensuring key insights are retained. Whether through advanced transformers or traditional NLP methods, Python provides powerful tools for automating this process.
Experiment with different models and techniques to find the best approach for your needs, and stay tuned for more Power Platform AI insights on The Power Pros!
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