Medical textbook summarization and guided navigation using statistical sentence extraction.

We present a method for automated medical textbook and encyclopedia summarization. Using statistical sentence extraction and semantic relationships, we extract sentences from text returned as part of an existing textbook search (similar to a book index). Our system guides users to the information they desire by summarizing the content of each relevant chapter or section returned in the search. The summary is tailored to contain sentences that specifically address the user's search terms. Our clustering method selects sentences that contain concepts specifically addressing the context of the query term in each of the returned sections. Our method examines conceptual relationships from the UMLS and selects clusters of concepts using Expectation Maximization (EM). Sentences associated with the concept clusters are shown to the user. We evaluated whether our extracted summary provides a suitable answer to the user's question.