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Hey HN, I created Tuchu because I wanted to increase my reading efficiency. It is a tool that automatically highlights the important parts of any document. Mos
by heresjohnny 6y ago
Hey HN,
I created Tuchu because I wanted to increase my reading efficiency. It is a tool that automatically highlights the important parts of any document. Most documents take about two to three seconds to process. It's directed at students, researchers, or anyone with a reading list and little time for that matter.
During my studies I had to go through a lot of literature, for example when I had to select relevant material for my thesis, or when I had to familiarize myself with a course's reading list. Tuchu helped me to get up to speed in these cases. What started off as a command-line Python script is now a web application that does its analysis without any back-end. I don't get to see your documents.
The underlying algorithm that selects what's relevant is called TextRank, an unsupervised summarization method [1]. It models a document (or a collection thereof) as a fully connected graph. Its nodes are parts of the text — I use sentences — and the edges between them are weighted by a similarity measure, in my case simple word overlap. The subset of sentences with the highest PageRank are then highlighted. For good measure, I also highlight sentences that contain signal words that — in my academic experience — signify importance.
It's important to note that Tuchu is not a substitute for doing your own reading. It could make you a faster reader by directing your attention to the important parts, but you'll still have to ponder about the true essence of a document yourself.
[1] https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W04-3252/ https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W04-3252/
- krat0sprakhar 6y agoLooks interesting! Is there a way to try it out on a webpage instead of PDF?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- quaintdev 6y agoThis kind of service would be amazing with a browser extension. Nowadays a lot of bloggers/reporters keep running round in circles before coming to a point. I actually wrote a post related about this a while back [0]. With browser extension this can save lot of time of readers. Heck I would pay for such a service! [0]: https://www.ankshilp.com/stop_beating_around_the_bush/ https://www.ankshilp.com/stop_beating_around_the_bush/
- donclark 6y agoI agree as well. This may have a 2nd life as a browser extension to use on articles on the web.
- sologuardsman2 6y ago+1 to the browser extension idea
- heresjohnny 6y agoHi krat0sprakhar, At this point you could print the page to a PDF and then upload it. A browser extension for webpages (as suggested by others) is a good idea! I'll look into it.
- donclark 6y agoI dont have a PDF laying around that I could test it with. It would be nice if you had an example link to a PDF, or screenshots showing an example of the highlighting that the service does.
- yorwba 6y agoThe background image with the stylized images of highlighted documents is an ideal candidate for replacement with a screenshot of actual highlighted documents.
- rdhyee 6y agoVery interesting. I'd love a way to download a highlighted version of the PDF that I fed to Tuchu. I uploaded a PDF version of a Wikipedia article to see what was selected, and at a quick glance, it's not obvious to me that the most important parts of the article have been highlighted. On the other hand, it's not obvious that trivial parts have been selected either -- leaving me intrigued to look further.
- aquajet 6y agoI made a similar site to Tuchu a while ago that attaches the highlights to the pdf: https://anishthite.github.io/ailight/ https://anishthite.github.io/ailight/. It's a bit slow though, I've been trying to get it to run faster.
- karthikb 6y agoHow did Tuchu's highlighting compared to the abstract?
- giovannibonetti 6y agoDoes It support other languages than English?
- jhvkjhk 6y agoI tested with a 26 pages Chinese pdf and the answer is no, Tuchu only highlighted three English sentences. This is weird, as Tuchu means highlight in Chinese.
- heresjohnny 6y agoHi jhvkjhk, Thanks for your feedback. In theory all languages should be supported since TextRank should be language-agnostic. Having said that, I think that my current sentence similarity strategy (by word overlap) is not a good fit for "symbol rich" languages such as Mandarin. I am not Chinese (or from Asian descent) myself. Tuchu comes from some rainy Sunday Google translating. ;)
- iav 6y agoDude! This is super helpful. I run a website with millions of huge text PDFs and thousands of users, and being able to implement this will literally save my users man years of time.
- heresjohnny 6y agoHey iav, Cool! Would love to hear more. Perhaps you could reach out at hello@tuchu.app? :)
- ArubaJamaica 6y agoCurious to know what website this is
- iav 6y agobankrupt11.com