Summly: intelligent news summarisation
summly.com
summly.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
http://gigaom.com/2012/10/31/summly-wants-to-make-news-summa...
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.
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.
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...
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/video/slacker-16-year-old-whiz-laun...
I think things have been fairly quiet for a few months pending this re-launch.
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].
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.
Anyway to still use that? The idea sounds very exciting and an online bookmarklet can super-useful to TL;DR anything.
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.