http://skimthat.com/4407/ind-home-explosion-now-homicide-inv...
It could have been summarized down to something like: Rumors are circulating that a suspicious white van was parked in front of the house that blew up.
I would rather it be super short with just the important fact. If it peaks my curiosity, then I'll click to the full article.
I don't know, that's just my opinion.
Our goal is to give the reader a good understanding of the topic while leaving out the unnecessary details and redundant information. The original had 465 words. That means that the Skim That summary cut the story down by over 50% while still giving you a strong overview of the story.
Here's why: Let's assume we have the perfect algorithm that knows exactly which sentences to pick for a good summary. You'll still end up with a summary that's horribly out of context and difficult to read.
Try it yourself. Assume your brain is the perfect algorithm and pick the most important sentences for a summary. Then try to read just the sentences that you picked without rewriting it into a coherent paragraph. More than likely, it'll be an out of context confusing block of text.
Algorithms will never solve the summarizing process unless they are teamed up with a rewriting engine that could build coherent paragraphs.
> Algorithms will never solve the summarizing process unless they are teamed up with a rewriting engine that could build coherent paragraphs.
That doesn't sound like never. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if such AI would created within 50-100 years, ie in my lifetime. I think this comment exposes the common false thought-pattern that if something is not viable in the next quarter, then it'll never happen.
I know if I wrote a summary of a Microsoft Surface article (I have one), it'd be very different from someone who loves it -- or is even an MS employee.
And spam... big issue there.
(disclaimer - I have your plugin and have tried it, summaries seem way too short.)
You should have a few links listed on that page that you know will work well as examples for people to try the service out with.
Btw, how do you feel about my other comments in this thread about algorithms not working well? My basic point is that they will most likely produce paragraphs that are out of context.
Disagree - having written a bunch of these gist extractors I have found that the good ones do not produce out of context paragraphs. In fact, that's pretty much the point - to find the salient portion of the content.
They are out of context because they (we) are basically just doing extraction. In which we just extract the most important sentences, arrange them in order, and present it in a paragraph / list. I prefer presenting the top sentences in a list though. In my opinion, presenting it as a paragraph will make an effect that it's out of context rather than in a list.
If the summaries was done through abstraction, like how humans are doing it, it will obviously produce better summaries. But why we are not doing it? I believe abstraction summaries are holy grail of automatic summarization.
In the meantime, I created a list[1] of popular stories from Reddit news sources. Each story links to a special hybrid page that allows you to write a summary on top while you read the story below.
[1] http://skimthat.com/unsummarized
edit: clarification
I really like how it uses line by line bullet point fields to help write the summary. I experimented with something like that in the past. It kind of works but it isn't as smooth a read as a paragraph of text but it does make the writing process easier.
It seems that I helped inspire you nonetheless, which is great of course!
As for what makes tldr.io great; it's mostly the Chrome plugin which adds TL;DR icons next to the links on Hacker News.
They still need to work on enticing more users to contribute back though.
Isn't it possible to discuss the merits of the product provided in the opening post without one-line nonsense posts spamming your own thing?
JEEZUZ.
Newser[2] tried to do the same thing but gave up and just focused on in-house created summaries.
Regarding the summary process, it's good to see another group manually summarizing posts as opposed to Summly[3] which tries automate the process. For many reasons already stated in another comment[4], I don't think automation will ever work.
Good luck to the guys over at http://toolong-didntread.com and http://newspaper23.com. I hope one of us gets some real traction!
[1] http://skimthat.com [2] http://www.newser.com/ [3] http://summly.com/ [4] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4741855
Edit: Another product that tries to summarize news http://cir.ca/