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I actually thought algorithmic summaries would be worse than useless but they seem surprisingly good. Here's the one from Caine's Arcade: "9 year old Caine set

by dreeves 15y ago

I actually thought algorithmic summaries would be worse than useless but they seem surprisingly good. Here's the one from Caine's Arcade: "9 year old Caine sets up an arcade in his father’s used car parts store in East L.A., using only cardboard boxes his dad had lying around and a ton of ingenuity. Watch his dreams come true when this filmmaker sets up a flash mob to come and play. Just watching this may make you a better person. $82,000 has already been raised for Caine’s scholarship fund! little behind on the bandwagon, but...film just had me in tears."

dy 15y ago
This is reductive summarization so it's selecting key sentences and phrases from the text (rather than generating any new phrasing) so occasionally it will seem brilliant, and other times...
- mjn 15y ago
  In particular, this approach works best with journalism-style writing. Journalists typically write in a style with fairly short sentences that stand alone, and paragraphs of only 1-3 sentences. They even pay deliberate attention to quotability, for either pull quotes or chance of being quoted elsewhere, so everything is well suited to pulling sentences out. Tends not to work as well when applied to other styles of writing. For more general text, the first problem that comes up is that out of context sentences with pronouns that point nowhere end up being unintelligible. The second sentence above only worked because the "he" was completely unambiguous in this summary.
  - petercooper 15y ago
    I've done some work in this area (specifically in developer related news) and you're right. The tricky ones are where you end up with links to GitHub repos or project pages that assume visitors know what they're looking for. Automated summaries then become less than useless :-( My dream solution? Developers learn to write nice summaries on their pages ;-)
    - mgkimsal 15y ago
      might be worthwhile to automatically fetch and parse text from some well-known urls (github, for example) to grab content from there to use as an adjunct.

by dreeves 15y ago

dy 15y ago

This is reductive summarization so it's selecting key sentences and phrases from the text (rather than generating any new phrasing) so occasionally it will seem brilliant, and other times...

mjn 15y ago
In particular, this approach works best with journalism-style writing. Journalists typically write in a style with fairly short sentences that stand alone, and paragraphs of only 1-3 sentences. They even pay deliberate attention to quotability, for either pull quotes or chance of being quoted elsewhere, so everything is well suited to pulling sentences out. Tends not to work as well when applied to other styles of writing. For more general text, the first problem that comes up is that out of context sentences with pronouns that point nowhere end up being unintelligible. The second sentence above only worked because the "he" was completely unambiguous in this summary.
- petercooper 15y ago
  I've done some work in this area (specifically in developer related news) and you're right. The tricky ones are where you end up with links to GitHub repos or project pages that assume visitors know what they're looking for. Automated summaries then become less than useless :-( My dream solution? Developers learn to write nice summaries on their pages ;-)
  - mgkimsal 15y ago
    might be worthwhile to automatically fetch and parse text from some well-known urls (github, for example) to grab content from there to use as an adjunct.