1. A method of automatic, computer based identification of a significant phrase in a document, the method comprising: storing the document, a threshold score, a verbosity setting, and a significant phrases data structure in a memory; accessing the memory to read a sequence of words from the document; determining by a processing unit a score for each word in the sequence based on the length of each word; operating the processing unit to compare the score for each word in the sequence against the threshold score; adding the sequence of words as a significant phrase to the significant phrase data structure if: the number of words in the sequence that have the score greater than the threshold score equals or exceeds a predetermined number and the number of words in the sequence satisfies the verbosity setting; retrieving a sentence from the document in the memory if the sentence contains a significant phrase stored in the significant phrases data structure; and operating the processing unit to search an abstract of the document to determine whether the sentence is included in the abstract.