METHOD FOR PRODUCING SUMMARIES OF TEXT DOCUMENT

A computer method for preparing a summary string from a source document of encoded text. The method comprises comparing a training set of encoded text documents with manually generated summary strings associated therewith to learn probabilities that a given summary word or phrase will appear in summary strings given a source word or phrase appears in encoded text documents and constructing from the source document a summary string containing summary words or phrases having the highest probabilities of appearing in a summary string based on the learned probabilities established in the previous step.