8. A computer system for displaying key information about a text object, comprising: a user interface configured to provide a display area for displaying a text element extracted from a text object; and a computer processor configured to receive the element and to enable the display of the element in the display area in the user interface, wherein the element is obtained based on a method comprising the steps of: (a) separating the content of the text object into a first group of text units, wherein the text object includes a single document or a collection of documents containing text, or a document segment marked by a boundary or by a section heading, or a page of a multi-page document, wherein the text units in the first group include a sentence, a paragraph, a single document, or a plurality of documents in a document collection, each of the text units comprising at least two terms, each term comprising one or more words or phrases; (b) tokenizing one or more text units into one or more tokens as instances of the one or more terms; (c) for one or more terms, incrementing a first cumulative value for the term based on the number of text units containing the term to produce a term score, wherein the term score is an importance score of the term representing an information focus in the text object; (d) selecting one or more terms based at least on the term score; and (e) extracting, from the text object, the selected terms or a sentence or paragraph containing the one or more selected terms for storage or display.
8. A computer system for displaying key information about a text object, comprising: a user interface configured to provide a display area for displaying a text element extracted from a text object; and a computer processor configured to receive the element and to enable the display of the element in the display area in the user interface, wherein the element is obtained based on a method comprising the steps of: (a) separating the content of the text object into a first group of text units, wherein the text object includes a single document or a collection of documents containing text, or a document segment marked by a boundary or by a section heading, or a page of a multi-page document, wherein the text units in the first group include a sentence, a paragraph, a single document, or a plurality of documents in a document collection, each of the text units comprising at least two terms, each term comprising one or more words or phrases; (b) tokenizing one or more text units into one or more tokens as instances of the one or more terms; (c) for one or more terms, incrementing a first cumulative value for the term based on the number of text units containing the term to produce a term score, wherein the term score is an importance score of the term representing an information focus in the text object; (d) selecting one or more terms based at least on the term score; and (e) extracting, from the text object, the selected terms or a sentence or paragraph containing the one or more selected terms for storage or display. 9. The system of claim 8 , wherein the term score is further produced by: dividing the first cumulative value by the total number of text units in the first group.