Abstract Due to the tremendous increment of data on the web, extracting the most important data as a conceptual brief would be valuable for certain users. Therefore, there is a massive enthusiasm concerning the generation of automatic text summary frameworks to constitute abstracts automatically from the text, web, and social network messages associated with their satellite content. This survey highlights, for the first time, how the swarm intelligence (SI) optimization techniques are performed to solve the text summarization task efficiently. Additionally, a convincing justification of why SI, especially Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), has been presented. Unfortunately, three types of text summarization tasks using SI indicate bit utilizing in the literature when contrasted with the other summarization techniques as machine learning and genetic algorithms, in spite of the fact that there are seriously promising outcomes of the SI methods. On the other hand, it has been noticed that the summarization task with multiple types has not been formalized as a multi-objective optimization (MOO) task before, despite that there are many objectives which can be considered. Moreover, the SI was not employed before to support the real-time summary approaches. Thus, a new model has been proposed to be adequate for achieving many objectives and to satisfy the real-time needs. Eventually, this study will enthuse researchers to further consider the various types of SI when solving the summarization tasks, particularly, in the short text summarization (STS) field.