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Summly: intelligent news summarisation

summly.com

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Re: Summly: intelligent news summarisation

#11

Post by BruceIV »

TeeWEE wrote: post #8

From the looks of the website, the video and what the apps does, it looks like the idea got too much funding. Cmo'n they even have a famous person in their clip! Most news sites already give a summary in an RSS feed. This is most of the time sufficient. I think that a good idea should sell itself, not with all this fancy pancy. -- Facts: 17 year developer got a $250.000 funding http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/12/17/m…

It looks like the 17-year-old got enough funding to hire a proper AI/NLP lab to do his algorithm - reading between the lines, it's difficult to say how much input the founder had on the new product: my guess would be concept, maybe design, and possibly interface coding.

Re: Summly: intelligent news summarisation

#12

Post by MojoJolo »

MojoJolo wrote: post #7

Is he doing extraction or abstraction? I'm doing a research about automatic summarization and also creating an app for it. Summly and my idea has a different approach but I'm curious in some aspects of how summly summarizes articles. I think last year, Summly was pulled out in the app store. Back in those days, the quality of there summary is not that impressive. I'm still downloading the app and will check its perfo…

I found the answer to my question. It is still extraction. Doing abstraction is still a difficult problem to solve.

the app's summaries are intelligible sentences, but since they're extracted from articles without providing any other context besides headlines, they often sound disjointed and non-conclusive. http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/1/3583720/summly-nick-d-aloi...

Re: Summly: intelligent news summarisation

#13

Post by MojoJolo »

BruceIV wrote: post #9
mej10 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be really awesome. Overall I like this landing page, but my main question is "how good is the summary?" and "Can I trust the summary generated?" Maybe non-technical people are just like, "Yeah! Awesome!" and that is all that matters. My thoughts are "How good is it? This is a hard problem and there is probably a lot of money in it. Why haven't other companies developed this?" The app itself and the site lo…

Very interesting. I'm on Android, so I can't actually try out the app, but I'd be interested to see what kind of compression ratio they get, how understandable it is, and if they hit all the major points. I'm also curious if they can create an intelligent summary of a cluster of related articles (say, the explosion of news recently about Disney buying out Lucasfilm), which seems like a problem that would be almost as…

A friend of mine is doing a research about this. Clustering articles through the use of neural networks. But of course, it can only cluster articles that is in their collection or corpus.

Re: Summly: intelligent news summarisation

#14

Post by orofino »

TeeWEE wrote: post #8

From the looks of the website, the video and what the apps does, it looks like the idea got too much funding. Cmo'n they even have a famous person in their clip! Most news sites already give a summary in an RSS feed. This is most of the time sufficient. I think that a good idea should sell itself, not with all this fancy pancy. -- Facts: 17 year developer got a $250.000 funding http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/12/17/m…

As a nerd I find much of the daily news to be rather trying. Much of it is of little interest and impact on my day to day life. I send a lot of time reading about technology and developments in our industry and almost no time on regular news.

That said, as someone who likes to be well rounded, I think this is a woefully inadequate state for myself. I'd like to be aware of what is happening in the world, financially, politically, and internationally. I yearn for a concise distillation of the torrent of news that most sites provide. I don't have time for nor desire to read all of that.

Right now I've got the following in my feed reader to try and fulfill this:

http://www.themorningnews.org/ - two times daily, kind of a lot of content, no summarization just links http://evening-edition.com/ - dialy, summaries of 4-6 of the days top news, I like this very much http://thebrief.io/ - tech oriented top news, seems to be delivered somewhat irregularly

I'm not overly happy with this, I might like a second take from an alternate source similar to the evening edition. The brief is delivered somewhat irregularly and I find the morning news to be just generally lacking, but enjoy some of the frivolous fun that they have with it. Perhaps an evening edition that has a little fun... hmm.

Given all of this, I'm quite interested in this service.

Re: Summly: intelligent news summarisation

#16

Post by pdog »

Off-topic, but does anyone know what sneakers Nick D'Aloisio is wearing in the video with Stephen Fry?

Looks like they have a slate gray upper, white soles, and a prominent logo on the tongue.

Edit: For anyone who's wondering, they're Gourmet Footwear[1].

[1] - http://gourmetfootwear.com/

Re: Summly: intelligent news summarisation

#18

Post by jondot »

Sorry, this isn't rocket science at all.

Standard clustering algorithms (found in any off-the-shelf natural text processing library) and text summation with libots should suffice for most of the heavy lifting.

http://tldr.it/ http://libots.sourceforge.net/

Further, most news articles' first paragraph is a practical (although you may have not noticed) summary.

Coming from NLP, unless you can influence the source and the source being Web, the story should be an 80%-20% in the best case -- and you'll work VERY hard to correct the remaining 20%, and you WILL remain with a percentage of content you just can't summarize properly.

What would make a difference is a real people-driven summation, not machines (see what voicebunny did for text-to-speech, for example). And yes, it would have been fun to combine the two as well.

Re: Summly: intelligent news summarisation

#19

Post by MojoJolo »

speek wrote: post #15

For a majority of news articles, the first three sentences is usually more than perfect as a summarization method -- feature stories on the other hand are insane (and that's why we have things like Lexical Chains: http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/W/W97/W97-0703.pdf )

We use lexical chains in our undergraduate thesis. Not a fan of it. AFAIK, not much of the text we summarized are affected by our lexical chain feature. It is a minor feature in our thesis. We combined lexical chains with other summarization techniques.

It's a good concept, but chains maybe a long one and may not be serve its "summary" purpose (maybe that's only for our case). In our thesis, we just extract the 5 most important sentences. Sentences with a lexical chain to a sentence or sentences may consume all the 5 sentences we needed and not leaving a room for other sentences in the text.

Re: Summly: intelligent news summarisation

#20

Post by MojoJolo »

jondot wrote: post #18

Sorry, this isn't rocket science at all. Standard clustering algorithms (found in any off-the-shelf natural text processing library) and text summation with libots should suffice for most of the heavy lifting. http://tldr.it/ http://libots.sourceforge.net/ Further, most news articles' first paragraph is a practical (although you may have not noticed) summary. Coming from NLP, unless you can influence the source and t…

I experienced an article in TheVerge which is mainly a video as its content.

What I will be amazed is a good automatic summarization algorithm that is using abstraction and not just extraction.

Also, check out circa (http://cir.ca/). Never tried, but as I read, it uses both human and algorithm to "summarize" articles.

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