Abstract: A method of automatically generating document extracts. The method makes use of feature value probabilities generated from a statistical analysis of manually generated summaries to extract the same set of sentences an expert might. The method is based upon an iterative approach. First, the computer system designates a sentence of the document as a selected sentence. Second, the computer system determine values for the selected sentence of each feature of a feature set. Third, the computer system increases a score for the selected sentence based upon the value of the feature for the selected sentence and upon the probability associated with that value. Fourth, after scoring all of the sentences of the document the computer system, the computer system selects a subset of the highest scoring sentences to be extracted.

Abstract: A method of automatically generating feature probabilities that allow later automatic generation of document extracts. The computer system generates the probabilities by analyzing each document a document at a time. First, the computer system designates one of the documents as a selected document. Next, the computer system analyzes each sentence of the selected document to determine the value of the paragraph feature and the value of the uppercase feature. The computer system repeats this effort for each document of the document corpus. Afterward, the number of occurrences of each value of each feature is calculated and is used to calculate feature value probabilities for all of the features.

Abstract: An automatic method of generating key phrases for a machine readable document. The method begins by breaking the text of the document into multi-word phrases free of stop words which begin and end acceptably. Afterward, the most frequent phrases are selected as key word phrases.

Abstract: A database system is provided for interchanging visually faithful renderings of fully formatted electronic documents among computers having different hardware configurations and different software operating environments for representing such documents by different encoding formats and for transferring such documents utilizing different file transfer protocols. All format conversions and other activities that are involved in transferring such documents among such computers essentially are transparent to their users and require no a priori knowledge on the part of any of the users with respect to the computing and/or network environments of any of the other users. All database operations are initiated and have their progress checked by means of a remote procedure call protocol which enables client applications to obtain partial results from them relatively quickly, without having to wait for such operations to complete their work.