Comment by logn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logn | Hacker News Reader

Generated 5 Sentence Summary for http://www.businessinsider.com/why-marissa-mayer-bought-a-30...

Back in March, Yahoo bought a startup called Summly for $30 million. Before Yahoo shut it down, Summly was a news aggregation app for smartphones. According to Summly's own Web site, the technology behind the app was "built" by an organization called "SRI International," not by the startup's employees. And indeed, inside Yahoo, Summly is called "Yahoo's Siri." A source close to Yahoo says that CEO Marissa Mayer believes summarization technology is "going to be huge for Yahoo" as it builds "personalized news feeds" into mobile versions of its "core experiences," including Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports. The job of implementing this technology at Yahoo will not be given to anyone from Summly, including its young CEO.

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Edit: Adding this...

Generated 3 Sentence Summary of Gettysburg Address

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

http://TLDRstuff.com comes back with:

Why Marissa Mayer Bought A $30M Startup - Business Insider: The deal got a lot of attention because Summly's CEO is 17-year-old Nick D'Aloisio. Acquiring Summly seems to have been an almost incidental side effect of a deal Yahoo made with SRI for a piece of "summarization technology." Until Yahoo bought it, SRI International held equity in Summly. The job of implementing this technology at Yahoo will not be given to anyone from Summly, including its young CEO.

Notice that the version from TLDR Stuff actually has the Answer in it. "Incidental side effect of a deal Yahoo make with SRI"

It also tells you that they aren't interested in the young CEO.

This is possible because it is not a keyword density Algo, the core technology called Liquid Helium is a Language Heuristics Engine and it can put weight on which sentences are Causality, and which are Subject matter. This creates a version of the text that tells you Who What Why and if there is still space, How. You can't do that with just a KeyWord density or where in the article is this system.

Summly claimed to have that tech, SRI has some of it, but what they really have is a nice Concept Tree, and sentence parser.

A far cry from a system that knows which points are important, not just which points are most talked about, because as you see in this Business insider article the important part isn't "what is summly" or "who is nick" or "Who is mayer" it is "Why did Yahoo do this" and that is captured in the TLDRSTuff/Stremor version, and not in TLDRizer.

Agreed!

This misses the most important line in the article: Acquiring Summly seems to have been an almost incidental side effect of a deal Yahoo made with SRI for a piece of "summarization technology".

the algo is still kinda "dumb". It basically tries to get top N keywords - most frequent non stopwords, stems them and goes through the sentences looking for which of them (upto max summary length) contain the keywords. I'll keep whittling at it over nights/weekends to see if I can make it more "semantically aware"

edit: some work is needed on the tokenization also. currently, I don't preserve non-period punctuation.

You might want to look into topic modeling to extract the most meaningful topics (set of co-occuring words). It could greatly improve your results compared to the keyword approach. Interesting initiative, keep us posted !

There's tons of human-generated TLDRs out there; I wonder if anyone's tried machine-learning from them.

I have to say this summary seems to make the whole summly purchase a lot clearer for me, rightly or wrongly, intentional or not.

$30 million to have the entire tech sphere spread the word on how Yahoo are evolving and are going to make peronalised summarized on the go news a core feature seems like a bargain (there certainly is a market for something like that I would say -- or at the very least, if implemented well, it certainly would be nice to have feature -- possibly a habit changer).

They no longer seem to me at the very least, the old who are they again company that they once were.

It's a shame they won't be changing their name anytime soon though. That on it's own puts me off a little. Forgive me for the snark.

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