Book excerpt: ntil now there has been no state-of-the-art collection of themost important writings in automatic text summarization. This bookpresents the key developments in the field in an integrated frameworkand suggests future research areas. With the rapid growth of the World Wide Web and electronic information services, information is becoming available on-line at an incredible rate. One result is the oft-decried information overload. No one has time to read everything, yet we often have to make critical decisions based on what we are able to assimilate. The technology of automatic text summarization is becoming indispensable for dealing with this problem. Text summarization is the process of distilling the most important information from a source to produce an abridged version for a particular user or task. Until now there has been no state-of-the-art collection of the most important writings in automatic text summarization. This book presents the key developments in the field in an integrated framework and suggests future research areas. The book is organized into six sections: Classical Approaches, Corpus-Based Approaches, Exploiting Discourse Structure, Knowledge-Rich Approaches, Evaluation Methods, and New Summarization Problem Areas. Contributors D. A. Adams, C. Aone, R. Barzilay, E. Bloedorn, B. Boguraev, R. Brandow, C. Buckley, F. Chen, M. J. Chrzanowski, H. P. Edmundson, M. Elhadad, T. Firmin, R. P. Futrelle, J. Gorlinsky, U. Hahn, E. Hovy, D. Jang, K. Sparck Jones, G. M. Kasper, C. Kennedy, K. Kukich, J. Kupiec, B. Larsen, W. G. Lehnert, C. Lin, H. P. Luhn, I. Mani, D. Marcu, M. Maybury, K. McKeown, A. Merlino, M. Mitra, K. Mitze, M. Moens, A. H. Morris, S. H. Myaeng, M. E. Okurowski, J. Pedersen, J. J. Pollock, D. R. Radev, G. J. Rath, L. F. Rau, U. Reimer, A. Resnick, J. Robin, G. Salton, T. R. Savage, A. Singhal, G. Stein, T. Strzalkowski, S. Teufel, J. Wang, B. Wise, A. Zamora