A method and apparatus for providing summaries of documents belonging to a class of documents in a classified document collection. A sample set of documents belonging to one or more classes is processed via a machine learning system in order to induce a set of rules associated with the sample set of documents. The vocabulary in the rules are extracted and compared to words, terms or phrases of an incoming document. Any matches between the extracted rules and the words, terms or phrases of the incoming document are used as a summary for the incoming document. By using the method and apparatus, each document does not have to be processed to find most important words and the like in order to provide a summary for that document and then repeating the same process for additional documents.