
NLP-generated summaries could replace traditional headlines - newman8r
https://www.quod.us/article/recurrent-neural-networks-could-combat-misleading-headlines
======
tzs
Are computer generated headlines anywhere near matching human generated
headlines such as these?

1935 headline on Variety article about how films about rural life did not do
well with rural audiences: STICKS NIX HICK PIX.

New York Daily News article in 1980 on New York state announcement on a Monday
that they were going to bail out a transit authority that was in trouble: SICK
TRANSIT'S GLORIOUS MONDAY.

Headline in the Sun on story about Inverness Caledonian Thistle beating Celtic
in the Scottish Cup: SUPER CALEY GO BALLISTIC CELTIC ARE ATROCIOUS.

New York Post on a 1983 murder: HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN TOPLESS BAR.

The Times (UK, not NY) on US-Iran talks in 2007: GREAT SATAN SITS DOWN WITH
AXIS OF EVIL.

The news will be overly dull if headlines like these do not continue to pop up
on occasion.

~~~
dctoedt
And then there's the possibly-apocryphal headline that I read about decades
ago, concerning an inmate at an insane asylum who raped a nurse and fled: NUT
SCREWS AND BOLTS.

Certainly these little bits of cleverness are mildly amusing. But if computer-
generated NLP summaries prove feasible, human headline writers will have a
hard time competing economically: many readers will choose the less-expensive
alternative — in much the same way that travelers overwhelmingly choose the
cheapest airlines over others offering more leg room, in-flight meals, etc.

~~~
stochastic_monk
BRIDGE HELD UP BY RED TAPE

Of course, I am interested in auto-generating puns. Databases of homophones
could be a good start.

------
anigbrowl
Digital dystopia: Robots MURDER free speech

~~~
labster
More like: The Top 11 Reasons to Always Believe Friend Computer

~~~
qop
I won't believe #6!!

~~~
opless
#10 made me cry!

------
cardine
It already does.

Source: We currently sell this service.

~~~
weberc2
Which company?

~~~
is_true
It says "state of the art" in the description. In my experience that's a
keyword for shitty service

------
dosy
The big question is whether that article itself had its own headline
automatically generated by NLP.

------
nabla9
It's not that hard because the goal is to clickbait:

Watch how this reacts to that!

(Then automatically remove all links to sources and further information from
the text)

~~~
thomasahle
If I could replace all those clickbait headlines with automatic summaries,
that'd be great.

~~~
amelius
Then the next step will be that the authors tweak the article until it
generates a sufficiently clickbaity headline.

------
mar77i
We're using a summarization tool (see below) in our software. User feedback is
mixed. I'm not sure whether that's because legally binding texts produced by
political bodies are complex and generally making themselves hard to be
understood or whether the algorithms themselves have shortcomings or if human
brains are silly enough so they'd make up shortcomings that really aren't
there.

We really looked through a couple of them and found them to be exceptionally
good.

[https://github.com/summanlp/textrank](https://github.com/summanlp/textrank)

------
KasianFranks
Context-controlled summarization would also help
[https://vectorspace.ai/datasets/example_context-
control.html](https://vectorspace.ai/datasets/example_context-control.html)

~~~
flexie
I am not sure what it going on here. How does it relate to crypto?

~~~
KasianFranks
Context-controlled sentiment analysis applied to news and information
summaries for the purpose of distinguishing leading price indicators versus
trailing price indicators.

------
bitL
If a fully automated company is algorithmically created and maintained that is
using NLP/CV to create short summaries/previews with hyperlinks, will it avoid
the upcoming link tax? If not, who will be responsible for paying it?

------
mingabunga
Isn't it actually called natural language generation, or NLG?

~~~
newman8r
I've seen NLU and NLG described as areas within NLP.

I think generating headlines from an article would use a bit of both. A pure
NLG task would be more like creating sentences to describe the weather based
on weather data, or medical data on a patient, etc.

I'm not an expert in the field though, really just a beginner so my
understanding may be off.

------
SubiculumCode
Sounds like a good Firefox extension.

------
asdsa5325
Is there supposed to be an article or something? Nothing shows for me.

~~~
theemathas
Copy-pasted the contents of the article here for you:

Misleading headlines and clickbait make it difficult to efficiently browse
news feeds. Natural language processing and recurrent neural networks could
soon be leveraged to generate unbiased, accurate summaries of articles and may
replace traditional hand-tailored headlines.

A 2015 Stanford paper[1] describes a process for generating headlines from the
text of news articles using recurrent neural networks. The process described
in the paper utilizes the first 50 words of an article, and concludes that
most of the time, the summary is valid and grammatically correct.

In the years since the Stanford paper was published, several open source
projects have emerged that simplify the process of getting started with
automatic headline generation[2][3]. The software is readily available - the
next step is for developers to include these open source tools in their own
consumer-facing applications.

It’s unlikely that major news outlets are going to adopt NLP-generated
headlines any time soon, and even if they did, it’s unlikely they’d be
employed to benefit the reader. Even so, there’s a place for these
programatically generated headlines: in the hands of consumers and software
developers working in the realm of news aggregation.

NLP-generated headlines could still be optimized for clicks without
compromising their accuracy. Several versions of these headlines could be AB
tested without any manual effort required on the author’s part. It’s also
worth noting that journalists at major media outlets generally don’t write
their own headlines anyway4, it’s usually done by editors.

Headlines could even be tailored to each reader: a technical reader may
appreciate a more sophisticated headline that contains jargon, but a layperson
might appreciate something more simplified. News reader applications and
content aggregators seem like natural fits for this type of technology.

With the amount of time people spend scanning through headlines every day, a
more effective way to summarize content could drastically improve the reader’s
experience. Google became the best search engine in part because it trusted
the PageRank algorithm more than webmaster-supplied summaries. In a very
similar sense, it’s become difficult to rely on the headlines provided content
creators, so it's quite possible that the concept of traditional headlines is
ready for disruption just like to concept of search was 20 years ago.

~~~
dabbledash
“Natural language processing and recurrent neural networks could soon be
leveraged to generate unbiased, accurate summaries of articles...”

I suppose they _could_ be. But I’m going to guess they mostly won’t be used
for that purpose.

We’ll likely just get headlines even more optimized for outrage or propaganda.

~~~
halflings
You're repeating what the article already says (and then gives a reasons to be
optimistic).

------
eruci
The next great idea is how to replace a headline with a single word.

~~~
sandebert
Even better/worse: an emoji

~~~
ilovetux
That's interesting, I know facebook has done some research on
emotion/sentiment analysis on posts and comments. I could see a browser
extension, a feature of a search engine or a content aggregator which analyses
the emotional context of an article during indexing and displays an emoji
describing the general tone of the article alongside an article's headline or
link text. I might even go ahead and build a hacker news clone which tries to
do this.

The funniest part will be to put the poop emoji next to a "fake news" or
clickbait article.

