Abstract
This paper presents a sentence-based information search method and its application to the assistance of summarization, considering and exploiting the expression features of the local assembly minutes to enable users to extract sentences of the specified type of information such as "policy description" and "opinion description." The assembly minutes are primarily the evidential record of the assembly activities, the preciseness is more weighed than the readability. However, the readability is an important issue to attract the interest of wider range of citizens, and our sentence-based search method contributes to that purpose. We show the application of the proposed method to the assistance of summarization. In contrast to the frequency-based keyword and sentence extraction as usually used in the automatic summarization methods, we show that more appropriate keywords are extracted from the members' question statements and the extraction of the sentences describing the administration's policies on those topics greatly improves the efficiency in making summaries that are important to attract the readers' interest.