Automatic text structuring and summarization

In recent years, information retrieval techniques have been used for automatic generation of semantic hypertext links. This study applies the ideas from the automatic link generation research to attack another important problem in text processing-automatic text summarization. An automatic ''general purpose'' text summarization tool would be of immense utility in this age of information overload. Using the techniques used (by most automatic hypertext link generation algorithms) for inter-document link generation, we generate intra-document links between passages of a document. Based on the intra-document linkage pattern of a text, we characterize the structure of the text. We apply the knowledge of text structure to do automatic text summarization by passage extraction. We evaluate a set of fifty summaries generated using our techniques by comparing them to paragraph extracts constructed by humans. The automatic summarization methods perform well, especially in view of the fact that the summaries generated by two humans for the same article are surprisingly dissimilar. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.