The invention provides a document representation method and a document analysis method including extraction of important sentences from a given document and/or determination of similarity between two documents.The inventive method detects terms that occur in the input document, segments the input document into document segments, each segment being an appropriately sized chunk and generates document segment vectors, each vector including as its element values according to occurrence frequencies of the terms occurring in the document segments. The method further calculates eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a square sum matrix in which a rank of the respective document segment vector is represented by R and selects from the eigenvectors a plural (L) of eigenvectors to be used for determining the importance. Then, the method calculates a weighted sum of the squared projections of the respective document segment vectors onto the respective selected eigenvectors and selects document segments having the significant importance based on the calculated weighted sum of the squared projections of the respective document segment vectors.