  We have developed an automatic abstract generation system for Japanese
expository writings based on rhetorical structure extraction. The system first
extracts the rhetorical structure, the compound of the rhetorical relations
between sentences, and then cuts out less important parts in the extracted
structure to generate an abstract of the desired length.
  Evaluation of the generated abstract showed that it contains at maximum 74\%
of the most important sentences of the original text. The system is now
utilized as a text browser for a prototypical interactive document retrieval
system.
