How to extract best illustrative sentences from documents for a given word?
Luhn, H.P. (1958, April). The automatic creation of literature abstracts. IBM Journal of Research and Development, 2(2), 159-165.


Describes the main elements of automatically creating literature abstracts. Significant sentences are candidates for inclusion into an abstract. The measure of sentence significance is based on significant words, and the proximity of significant words within sentences. Word significance is based on its frequency within the document; the word-frequency diagram depicts the set of words to consider as significant. Word significance also applies to the creation of indexes for search and retrieval.


Consider also the presentation I created when I took a graduate course: "Term Association and Thesaurus Construction"; you might find the references there useful too.