

Summly: intelligent news summarisation - flashingpumpkin
http://summly.com/

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jondot
Sorry, this isn't rocket science at all.

Standard clustering algorithms (found in any off-the-shelf natural text
processing library) and text summation with libots should suffice for most of
the heavy lifting.

<http://tldr.it/> <http://libots.sourceforge.net/>

Further, most news articles' first paragraph is a practical (although you may
have not noticed) summary.

Coming from NLP, unless you can influence the source and the source being Web,
the story should be an 80%-20% in the _best_ case -- and you'll work VERY hard
to correct the remaining 20%, and you WILL remain with a percentage of content
you just can't summarize properly.

What _would_ make a difference is a real people-driven summation, not machines
(see what voicebunny did for text-to-speech, for example). And yes, it would
have been fun to combine the two as well.

~~~
MojoJolo
I experienced an article in TheVerge which is mainly a video as its content.

What I will be amazed is a good automatic summarization algorithm that is
using abstraction and not just extraction.

Also, check out circa (<http://cir.ca/>). Never tried, but as I read, it uses
both human and algorithm to "summarize" articles.

~~~
jondot
circa is a good idea, actually. From my close experience with this field, when
a news article will be published it will be edited and republished many times,
over many forms and shapes (Web, RSS, etc.) in many of these steps, a manual,
human work is needed -- and this affects the volumes of the published news.

Further, many of the news really originate from relatively limited sources
(reuters, etc), so you can plug your solution there as well.

Therefore it should be OK to assume that if you put humans at the same
pipeline to summarize news manually, the capacity and efficiency will be
reasonable.

~~~
MojoJolo
The problem in summarizing news manually is that it takes too much effort for
a human to do it. The efficiency may be good, but as many news pass by, his
efficiency will go down. (assuming that he's only the one summarizing)

~~~
jondot
True, but my point is people are already doing it at the start of the
pipeline. Think what happens when Reuters decide to make a SaaS offering of
their summarized content. Even regardless of that, you can hire a battery of
professional summarizers instead of PHDs and do it pretty well.

Where this doesn't apply, and where I do think you're completely right is non-
news articles: think blogs, tweets (although there's not much to summarize in
140chars), product descriptions, scientific articles, etc. These things are
produced in much more volume and much less workflow around them.

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TeeWEE
From the looks of the website, the video and what the apps does, it looks like
the idea got too much funding.

Cmo'n they even have a famous person in their clip!

Most news sites already give a summary in an RSS feed. This is most of the
time sufficient.

I think that a good idea should sell itself, not with all this fancy pancy.

\-- Facts: 17 year developer got a $250.000 funding
[http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/12/17/meet-the-16-year-
old-w...](http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/12/17/meet-the-16-year-old-whose-
summly-app-notched-up-17k-downloads-in-4-days/)

~~~
orofino
As a nerd I find much of the daily news to be rather trying. Much of it is of
little interest and impact on my day to day life. I send a lot of time reading
about technology and developments in our industry and almost no time on
regular news.

That said, as someone who likes to be well rounded, I think this is a woefully
inadequate state for myself. I'd like to be aware of what is happening in the
world, financially, politically, and internationally. I yearn for a concise
distillation of the torrent of news that most sites provide. I don't have time
for nor desire to read all of that.

Right now I've got the following in my feed reader to try and fulfill this:

<http://www.themorningnews.org/> \- two times daily, kind of a lot of content,
no summarization just links <http://evening-edition.com/> \- dialy, summaries
of 4-6 of the days top news, I like this very much <http://thebrief.io/> \-
tech oriented top news, seems to be delivered somewhat irregularly

I'm not overly happy with this, I might like a second take from an alternate
source similar to the evening edition. The brief is delivered somewhat
irregularly and I find the morning news to be just generally lacking, but
enjoy some of the frivolous fun that they have with it. Perhaps an evening
edition that has a little fun... hmm.

Given all of this, I'm quite interested in this service.

~~~
nostrich
Sorry to drive this off topic. I run The Brief, and to date I've published
every week day by 10am, with the exception of two days where I had to delay it
to later in the day due to a hurricane doing its best to destroy my city. What
is it about that schedule you find irregular? I welcome any feedback. Feel
free to email me (the address is listed on the site).

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speek
For a majority of news articles, the first three sentences is usually more
than perfect as a summarization method -- feature stories on the other hand
are _insane_ (and that's why we have things like Lexical Chains:
<http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/W/W97/W97-0703.pdf>)

~~~
MojoJolo
We use lexical chains in our undergraduate thesis. Not a fan of it. AFAIK, not
much of the text we summarized are affected by our lexical chain feature. It
is a minor feature in our thesis. We combined lexical chains with other
summarization techniques.

It's a good concept, but chains maybe a long one and may not be serve its
"summary" purpose (maybe that's only for our case). In our thesis, we just
extract the 5 most important sentences. Sentences with a lexical chain to a
sentence or sentences may consume all the 5 sentences we needed and not
leaving a room for other sentences in the text.

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MojoJolo
Is he doing extraction or abstraction? I'm doing a research about automatic
summarization and also creating an app for it. Summly and my idea has a
different approach but I'm curious in some aspects of how summly summarizes
articles.

I think last year, Summly was pulled out in the app store. Back in those days,
the quality of there summary is not that impressive. I'm still downloading the
app and will check its performance.

~~~
MojoJolo
I found the answer to my question. It is still extraction. Doing abstraction
is still a difficult problem to solve.

 __ _the app's summaries are intelligible sentences, but since they're
extracted from articles without providing any other context besides headlines,
they often sound disjointed and non-conclusive._
__[http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/1/3583720/summly-nick-d-
aloi...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/1/3583720/summly-nick-d-aloisio)

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flashingpumpkin
Here's [1] an interview Nick gave just a couple of hours ago on Bloomsberg.

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/video/slacker-16-year-old-whiz-
laun...](http://www.bloomberg.com/video/slacker-16-year-old-whiz-launches-app-
snags-250m-5co3OFUER_CoLdymHYScOQ.html)

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arctangent
Relevant news story about this from December 2011:
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16306742>

I think things have been fairly quiet for a few months pending this re-launch.

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pdog
Off-topic, but does anyone know what sneakers Nick D'Aloisio is wearing in the
video with Stephen Fry?

Looks like they have a slate gray upper, white soles, and a prominent logo on
the tongue.

Edit: For anyone who's wondering, they're Gourmet Footwear[1].

[1] - <http://gourmetfootwear.com/>

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hoodwink
Very impressive design / interface. The summaries help me decide which
articles to read in full, as opposed to being abridged versions of the full
stories. Still useful, but not a substitute for my Times Digest
(<http://www.timesdigest.com/>).

~~~
orofino
They don't seem to indicate the cost without signing up for this, what do they
charge you for the times digest? Also, is there an easy way to get it that
isn't a pdf?

Sorry to hit you with a barrage of questions, but this is interesting and I
didn't get much info from their site. IT seems that this is intended for
larger entities to distribute to clients for the most part. They do have an
individuals section, but without much info.

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pratyushmittal
The Summly blog mentions about a demo to "let people enter a web site’s URL
and receive a summary of the content."

Anyway to still use that? The idea sounds very exciting and an online
bookmarklet can super-useful to TL;DR anything.

~~~
mej10
That would be really awesome. Overall I like this landing page, but my main
question is "how good is the summary?" and "Can I trust the summary
generated?"

Maybe non-technical people are just like, "Yeah! Awesome!" and that is all
that matters. My thoughts are "How good is it? This is a hard problem and
there is probably a lot of money in it. Why haven't other companies developed
this?"

The app itself and the site look nice.

~~~
BruceIV
Very interesting. I'm on Android, so I can't actually try out the app, but I'd
be interested to see what kind of compression ratio they get, how
understandable it is, and if they hit all the major points. I'm also curious
if they can create an intelligent summary of a cluster of related articles
(say, the explosion of news recently about Disney buying out Lucasfilm), which
seems like a problem that would be almost as hard as "general AI".

~~~
MojoJolo
A friend of mine is doing a research about this. Clustering articles through
the use of neural networks. But of course, it can only cluster articles that
is in their collection or corpus.

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ericsaunders
Great application. similar to Circa in a way but I think Circa's user
experience and notifications are better.

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cmatthias
That is a seriously large iPhone at the bottom right of the landing page.

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retube
"To use Summly pls use Chrome, Firefox or Safari"

