This paper proposes a method of selecting important sentences from a text based on the evaluation of the connectivity between sentences by using surface information. We assume that the title of a text is the most concise statement which expresses the most essential information of the text,and that the closer a sentence relates to an important sentence,the more important this sentence is.The importance of a sentence is defined as the connectivity between the sentence and the title.The

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... y between two sentences is measured based on correference between a pronoun and a preceding(pro)noun,and on lexical cohesion of lexical items.In an experiment with 80 English texts,which consist of an average of 29.0 sentences,the proposed method has marked 78.2% recall and 57.7% precision,with the selection ratio being 25%.The recall and precision values surpass those achieved by conventional methods,which means that our method is more effective in abridging relatively short texts.