Abstract
The effectiveness of various statistical measures of sentence importance was compared for automatic text summarization done by extracting important sentences. We focused on comparing various measures of sentence similarity on the assumption that important sentences in an article are similar to the title. Two types of similarity measures were compared: one uses word co-occurrence statistics and the other does not. The former proved superior to the latter. Other automatic text summarization methods, such as extracting the leading part of an article, or extracting sentences with important words, proved inferior to the similarity-based method. These results show that similarity measurement using word co-occurrence statistics is effective for automatic text summarization.
