Finding the main themes in a spanish document

The computer can easily carry out many operations on systematic collections of data when these are numbers: • What are the data about? What are the main topics? • Make a summary. Obtain a summary of May sales of a given store. • Compare. Compare May sales in stores A and B. • Find similarities and discrepancies. How are sales of stores A and B similar? • Find averages. Find the sales in the South of Mexico, in Fall 1997. • Find tendencies. Extrapolate. On the other hand, when data appear in documents in Spanish, organized in sections, paragraphs and sentences, it is not possible for the computer to carry out the above operations. As much of human knowledge is in texts written in natural language, it is convenient to discover methods to carry out those operations. For that, the computer must understand or comprehend the text. This paper shows how to analyze a document containing natural language sentences, so as to recognize its main topics or themes.