1 ) A method of forming a summary for hierarchically related information, where the information can be represented as a set of nodes wherein each node is associated with a portion of the information and that portion of the information contains at least one sentence, the nodes are connected by directed edges wherein each node has at most one incoming edge, a parent node is the source of an incoming edge, a child node is the target of an outgoing edge a) determining a sentence vector for each sentence associated with each node, b) determining a centroid vector of the sentence vectors, c) determining an intrinsic score for each sentence, d) selecting the sentence with the highest intrinsic score to form a summary, e) determining an extract score for each of the remaining sentences from the intrinsic score and the summary, f) selecting the sentence with the highest extract score and adding it to the summary, and g) repeating steps e) and f) until a desired number of sentences are selected.