Salience is an important characteristic of information influencing users' cognitive and emotional states. For example, salient parts of a document are those that will be considered moving or provoking by readers. This article studies the concept of salience and its specific meanings in linguistics. Then it analyses the main difficulties of content-based techniques for automatic identification of salient passages in a document. A new, context-based method for overcoming these difficulties is subsequently presented. Our method identifies passages that readers have reacted to by analyzing their textual feedback. Our experimentation revealed that it is effective and can be broadly used.