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The Summly app doesn't create summaries and I don't think algorithms will ever create good summaries. Nick D’Alosio deserves a ton of credit. He's smart, creat

The Summly app doesn't create summaries and I don't think algorithms will ever create good summaries. Nick D’Alosio deserves a ton of credit. He's smart, creative, young, ambitious, pulled together a good team and created a great looking app but I don't believe this will solve the problem. Before I created Skim That[1], a human powered news summarizing website, I looked into how Summly and other TL;DR algorithms worked to decide which direction I wanted to go in. I concluded that, even if you create the best algorithm that takes the best sentences from a story, you're still going to end up with a poorly written and out of context paragraph. Try it yourself. Read a story and try to manually find a few sentences that best summarize it. Then, without rewriting anything, try to put those sentences into a paragraph or two. You'll find that you end up with a confusing summary that's difficult to read. The amount of words Summly limited itself to (one iPhone screen worth) is brilliant. It keeps things simple and easy to skim through but what's produced by the service is so short that it should be called a "tease" not a "summary". Of course, the Summly app does hit the nail on the head with a summary every once in a while but this hit or miss style makes for a bad experience. Summarizing algorithms aren't the automation challenge, those will never work right as demonstrated by the "try it yourself" challenge above. The real automation challenge is rewriting the important sentences in such a way that they make sense together and provide proper context. On Skim That, I'm trying to solve the problem by crowd sourcing the summarizing process and asking readers to summarize a story. I've gotten a few people to give it a shot and several of those continue to summarize stories every once in a while. My challenge is how to get people more interested in participating and how to get search engine traffic to a website that goes against many SEO principals. [1] http://skimthat.com http://skimthat.com Edit: Human or machine, I think the summary race is great for readers and helps people be more informed. I wish Nick a lot of luck and hope that one of us solves this problem soon.

petercooper 14y ago
I concluded that, even if you create the best algorithm that takes the best sentences from a story, you're still going to end up with a poorly written and out of context paragraph. Even worse, many (most?) writers are pretty bad at this too. Writing summaries has become one of my main jobs over the past couple of years and it's still pretty tough with a lot of source material where a full read and comprehension is required. Algorithms currently suck as 'one size fits all' approaches for almost anything, including curation and summarizing, but.. it's an interesting and narrow enough problem space that some genuine AI or natural language processing innovations could come out of it, so as you say, it'd be great to see it come good.
- MichaelApproved 14y ago
  "a full read and comprehension is required" Exactly! Not only that but sometimes the original author does a poor job of writing the article and a rewrite of the content is needed just to make the story coherent. Natural language is interesting and SEO guys are also working on rewriting tools so they could repackage articles as OC.

petercooper 14y ago

I concluded that, even if you create the best algorithm that takes the best sentences from a story, you're still going to end up with a poorly written and out of context paragraph. Even worse, many (most?) writers are pretty bad at this too. Writing summaries has become one of my main jobs over the past couple of years and it's still pretty tough with a lot of source material where a full read and comprehension is required. Algorithms currently suck as 'one size fits all' approaches for almost anything, including curation and summarizing, but.. it's an interesting and narrow enough problem space that some genuine AI or natural language processing innovations could come out of it, so as you say, it'd be great to see it come good.

MichaelApproved 14y ago
"a full read and comprehension is required" Exactly! Not only that but sometimes the original author does a poor job of writing the article and a rewrite of the content is needed just to make the story coherent. Natural language is interesting and SEO guys are also working on rewriting tools so they could repackage articles as OC.