1. A method comprising: determining that a chat summary will be provided to a participant in a multi-participant instant messaging chat session; retrieving a transcript of the multi-participant instant messaging chat session from machine-readable memory; a machine segmenting the transcript into a plurality of transcript segments; the machine summarizing each of the transcript segments to generate summaries of the transcript segments; the machine merging the summaries of the transcript segments to generate the chat summary; and supplying the chat summary to the participant.