Method and apparatus for generating overview information for hierarchically related information

摘要

A method is provided for digesting the content of hierarchically related information. The method, which obtains relatively short overviews, selects a proportion of representative nodes and then extracts and organizes one or more sentences from the text associated with each selected node. For text trees representing archived discussions, the selection of nodes and sentences is from comment/response sequences drawn from lexically central nodes which will capture those aspects of the discussion considered most important to discussion participants.