4 ms·

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

• mjn 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.