Statistical Methods For Retrieving Most Significant Paragraphs In Newspaper Articles

Retrieving a most stgulficant paragraph m a newspaper arUcle can act as a kind of surnmanzatmn It can gwe the human reader some hints on the contents of the arucle and help him to decide whether It deseei'ves a full readmg or not It may also act as a filter for a robust natural language understanding system, to extract relevant mformatton from that paragraph m order to enable conceptual mformauon retrieval Talang a newspaper arUcle and a base corpus, word co-occurrences w3th higher resolving power are ~dent~fied These co-occurrences are used to estabhsh hnks between the paragraphs of the arUcle The paragraph which presents the larger number of hnks tO other paragraphs ~s considered a most slgmficant one Though designed and tested for the Portuguese language, the staUshcal nature of our proposal should ensure ns portabtlny to other languages