Patent ID: 7251781

Claim:
A method for summarizing the contents of a natural language document including a plurality of sentences and provided in electronic or digital form, said method comprising: A. extracting words from sentences in said document, including determining knowledge at a fact level for each sentence by: i) identifying the words within the sentence as parts of speech in the form of eSAOs, including identifying the words as at least one of subjects, objects, actions, adjectives, prepositions, indirect objects and adverbials; and ii) determining if Cause-Effect relationships exist in the sentence based on semantic relationships between eSAOs in the sentence; B. determining a weight for each eSAO and a Cause-Effect weight for each Cause-Effect relationship; C. determining a sentence weight for each sentence in said document, using the weights of all eSAOs for said sentence and, if the sentence has a Cause-Effect relationship, the Cause-Effect weight for each Cause-Effect relationship in the sentence; and D. generating one or more weight-based document summaries as a function of said sentence weights and at least one of displaying the summaries to a user and storing the summaries to a memory.