MS Word's "Automated summary" feature -- come on now

["Downing, David" <DavidDowning -at- Users -dot- com>]

I just stumbled across the Automated Summary feature of MS Word, which
claims to be able to identify all the sentences in your document that
are most relevant to the main theme. I gave it a try (using the
"separate document" option) and of course, what I got looked like a
bunch of sentences picked at random. At the risk of sounding
old-fashioned, it seems to me that there's no way such a qualitative
task can be automated. I'd like to know how the folk at Microsoft
thought they could do this. I'd also be interested in knowing what kind
of algorithm they used, if anyone knows.

David
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