ots

Summarize a text file to the default 20%

$ ots [path/to/file.txt]

$ ots -r [10] [path/to/file.txt]

$ ots -r [15] -o [summary.txt] [path/to/file.txt]

$ ots --html --out=[summary.html] [path/to/file.txt]

$ ots --about [path/to/file.txt]

$ ots --dic=[de] [path/to/file.txt]

$ cat [path/to/file.txt] | ots -r [10]

ots [OPTIONS...] [file.txt | stdin]

ots (Open Text Summarizer) is an automatic text summarization tool that reads a document, determines which sentences are most important, and produces a condensed version. It performs extractive summarization, selecting and preserving original sentences rather than generating new prose.
The tool works in three stages: first it filters common stop words using XML-based language dictionaries, then performs term frequency analysis to score sentences by density of significant words, and finally applies linguistic refinement using the Porter Stemming Algorithm to group word variants. It supports 37+ languages via XML dictionary files.
Output can be plain text or HTML with important sentences highlighted.

-r INT, --ratio=INT

Summarization percentage; sets output length as a percentage of the input. Default: 20.

Output file path. Default: stdout.

Output as HTML with important sentences highlighted

Output only keyword and topic extraction (useful for generating meta-tag content)

Specify a custom dictionary/language file for stop-word filtering

Display version information

Display help/usage information

OTS performs extractive summarization only and does not generate new prose. It works best with well-structured non-fiction prose like news articles and technical documents. It performs poorly on fiction, short texts, lists, and bullet points. The Porter Stemmer is approximately 90% accurate and may miss morphological variants, especially in non-English languages. The last formal release (0.5.0) dates to 2007 and the codebase has not seen active feature development since.

OTS was developed by Nadav Rotem starting in April 2003, with version 0.1.0 released in May 2003. Language support expanded to 24 languages by July 2003 and eventually to over 37. It gained academic recognition, being cited in at least four publications. The library was integrated as a plugin into AbiWord and gedit. The latest release is version 0.5.0 from April 2007. It remains packaged in Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and other distributions.

wc(1), less(1), fmt(1)