Prior art methods of processing text typically incorporate linguistic knowledge that is not resident in the text (e.g., document) being processed. Prior art text summarization methods often rely on a collection of exemplary text that is external to the text being processed to assess the role a word plays in the text being processed. For those methods that rely on a collection of exemplary text, it is difficult, if not impossible, to generate a single collection of exemplary text that can be used to successfully summarize textual documents on widely different topics because a word in one context may have a different meaning in another context. This problem is often overcome in the prior art by generating multiple collections of exemplary text, where each collection is tailored to a specific topic (e.g., scientific, financial). Generating a collection of exemplary text is difficult, time consuming, and prone to error (e.g., biases of those generating the collection).
U.S. Pat. No. 5,384,703, entitled “METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR SUMMARIZING DOCUMENTS ACCORDING TO THEME”; U.S. Pat. No. 5,638,543, entitled, “METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR AUTOMATIC DOCUMENT SUMMARIZATION”; U.S. Pat. No. 5,708,822, entitled, “METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR THEMATIC PARSING OF DISCOURSE”; U.S. Pat. No. 5,768,580, entitled “METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR DYNAMIC CLASSIFICATION OF DISCOURSE”; U.S. Pat. No. 5,978,820, entitled “TEXT SUMMARIZING METHOD AND SYSTEM”; U.S. Pat. No. 5,924,108, entitled “DOCUMENT SUMMARIZER FOR WORD PROCESSORS”; and U.S. Pat. No. 6,199,034, entitled “METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR DETERMINING THEME FOR DISCOURSE,” each disclose a method of summarizing text that relies on information not contained in the text being summarized. The information not contained in the text comes in various forms such as a stop list, a lexicon, a knowledge catalog that includes static ontologies, a word dictionary, and a pre-compiled list of words and phrases. The present invention does not rely on any of these forms of information. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,384,703; 5,638,543; 5,708,822; 5,768,580; 5,978,820; 5,924,108; and 6,199,034 are hereby incorporated by reference into the specification of the-present invention.