Text summarizers using relevance measurement technologies and latent semantic analysis techniques provide accurate and useful summarization of the contents of text documents. Generic text summaries may be produced by ranking and extracting sentences from original documents; broad coverage of document content and decreased redundancy may simultaneously be achieved by constructing summaries from sentences that are highly ranked and different from each other. In one embodiment, conventional Information Retrieval (IR) technologies may be applied in a unique way to perform the summarization; relevance measurement, sentence selection, and term elimination may be repeated in successive iterations. In another embodiment, a singular value decomposition technique may be applied to a terms-by-sentences matrix such that all the sentences from the document may be projected into the singular vector space; a text summarizer may then select sentences having the largest index values with the most important singular vectors as part of the text summary.