US Patent 9767186 Retrieving a specific sentence from a document

An apparatus retrieves and outputs a specific sentence from a document. An acceptance hardware component acquires a retrieval key. An importance calculation hardware component calculates the level of importance of each sentence included in a search target document. A document processing hardware component extracts a sentence including the retrieval key from the search target. A retrieval result processing hardware component corrects a value of importance of each sentence calculated by the importance calculation hardware component for the sentence based on the position of the sentence in the search target document to calculate a corrected level of importance. A display control hardware component outputs the sentence extracted by the document processing hardware component according to the display order based on the corrected level of importance.