  We present a robust approach for detecting intrinsic sentence importance in
news, by training on two corpora of document-summary pairs. When used for
single-document summarization, our approach, combined with the "beginning of
document" heuristic, outperforms a state-of-the-art summarizer and the
beginning-of-article baseline in both automatic and manual evaluations. These
results represent an important advance because in the absence of cross-document
repetition, single document summarizers for news have not been able to
consistently outperform the strong beginning-of-article baseline.
