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Popularity of the Internet has contributed towards the explosive growth of online information, and it is especially useful to have tools which can help users digest information content. Text summarization addresses this need by taking a source text, selecting the most important portions of it, and presenting coherent summary to the user in a manner sensitive to the user's or application's needs. The goal of this paper is to show how these objectives can be achieved through an efficient use of lexical cohesion. The current work addresses both generic and query-based summaries in the context of single documents and sets of documents as in current news. We present an approach for identifying the most important portions of the text which are topically best suited to represent the source texts according to the author's views or in response to the user's interests. This identification must also take into consideration the degree of connectiveness among the chosen text portions so as to minimize the danger of producing summaries which contain poorly linked sentences. We present a system that handles these objectives, discuss its performance, and evaluate it and compare it to other systems in the context of Document Understanding Conference (DUC) evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterprise corpora contain evidence of what employees work on and therefore can be used to automatically find experts on a given topic. We present a general approach for representing the knowledge of a potential expert as a mixture of language models from associated documents. First we retrieve documents given the expert's name using a generative probabilistic technique and weight the retrieved documents according to expert-specific posterior distribution. Then we model the expert indirectly through the set of associated documents, which allows us to exploit their underlying structure and complex language features. Experiments show that our method has excellent performance on the expert search task of the TREC Enterprise track and that it effectively collects and combines evidence for expertise in a heterogeneous collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]