Overview

A college major project built around a simple idea: help people stay informed without having to work through every lengthy news article. The application combined a news summarization experience with a separate tool for summarizing user-provided text.

The challenge

Keeping up with current events can involve navigating multiple sources and reading lengthy articles. Short news snippets can provide a quick gist but may leave out the context needed to understand the full story. We wanted to make longer news content easier to digest without reducing it to a headline-like takeaway.

Approach

The application had two main workflows. The first fetched news through the Google News API, processed the retrieved content, and presented summarized articles. The second allowed users to submit their own text for summarization. Together, these workflows made the application useful both for following news and for condensing other written content.

Key features

• News retrieval through the Google News API
• Automated summarization of news articles
• Dedicated text summarization interface
• User-provided text input
• A web-based interface for accessing summarized content

Takeaway

The project explored a practical application of NLP around an everyday information problem. An important distinction was the difference between providing a quick gist and producing a summary that retains the substance and context of the original article.