Extracting Key Sentences from Text

Automatic key sentence extraction from a text is a challenging task. It has numerous applications in text processing systems. The actual task of key sentence extraction consists of three main functionalities: (i) Identification of sentence boundary in a text, (ii) a ranking function that assigns a score between (0-1) for each correctly extract- ed sentence based on important semantics of the text and (iii) Deciding the most relevant sentences based on evaluation function. This study carries out a survey about the state of the art in the field. It later proposed a heuristic based extraction using lexical chain of terms. The proposed approach is evaluated by using human based evaluation criteria on some existing text datasets. Encouraging results were obtained.