Automatic Text Summarization was added as a major research thrust of the TIPSTER program during TIPSTER Phase III, 1996-1998. It is a natural extension of the previously supported research efforts in Information Extraction (IE) and Information Retrieval (IR). There is considerable interest in automatically producing summaries due, in large part, to the growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The TIPSTER program sponsored seven research efforts into text summarization, all with different approaches to the problem.