  Summarization is one of the key features of human intelligence. It plays an
important role in understanding and representation. With rapid and continual
expansion of texts, pictures and videos in cyberspace, automatic summarization
becomes more and more desirable. Text summarization has been studied for over
half century, but it is still hard to automatically generate a satisfied
summary. Traditional methods process texts empirically and neglect the
fundamental characteristics and principles of language use and understanding.
This paper summarizes previous text summarization approaches in a
multi-dimensional classification space, introduces a multi-dimensional
methodology for research and development, unveils the basic characteristics and
principles of language use and understanding, investigates some fundamental
mechanisms of summarization, studies the dimensions and forms of
representations, and proposes a multi-dimensional evaluation mechanisms.
Investigation extends to the incorporation of pictures into summary and to the
summarization of videos, graphs and pictures, and then reaches a general
summarization framework.
