Techniques are described herein for automatic generation of a title or summary from a long body of text. A grammatical tree representing one or more sentences of the long body of text is generated. One or more nodes from the grammatical tree are selected to be removed. According to one embodiment, a particular node is selected to be removed based on its position in the grammatical tree and its node-type, where the node type represents a grammatical element of the sentence. Once the particular node is selected, a branch of the tree is cut at the node. After branch has been cut, one or more sub-sentences are generated from the remaining nodes in the grammatical tree. The one or more sub-sentences may be returned as a title or summary.