Examines four working steps from an empirical model where an expert abstractor discovers what a paper is about and drafts a topic sentence; a simulation system is developed using this model. Discusses knowledge processing activities of professional summarizing. Results indicate that a small simulation model of professional summarizing is feasible.…

Describes a system that performs automatic summaries of news from a large commercial news service encompassing 41 different publications. This system was compared to a system that used only the lead sentences of the texts. Lead-based summaries significantly outperformed the sentence-selection summaries. (AEF)

Describes and evaluates a system that selects key information from an event database by reasoning about event frequencies, frequencies of relations between events, and domain-specific importance measures. The system aggregates similar information and plans a summary tailored to a stereotypical user. (AEF)