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Comment by Charlesmigli | Hacker News Reader

As as cofounder of http://tldr.io this confirms our vision that for now (and for many years) only people can perform such a hard task like summarizing.

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I agree with "for now" but not "for many years". Right now, most or all automatic summarizers are doing extraction. Which is just lifting sentences from the original article itself. It is different from the human perception of summary, which is abstraction. That uses the most important parts of the article and paraphrase it for easy reading.

Right now, abstraction or paraphrasing is hard to do by a computer. But I think and hopefully it will be possible in few years time. There are various open source and academic tools that can do some pretty good NLP. I'm looking into Apache OpenNLP, and WordNet. I'm hoping for 2 or 3 years time.

BTW, I have an app similar to your tldr.io. Check my HN comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5523770) for more info about it. ;)

Changing the sentences adds bias. Maintaining the author's intent is important.

Generating news highlights from lots of sources might be cool as computer generated content. But rewriting an author's story in new words is not adding value it is just ripping them off.

Thanks. I got pretty good insights. Bias doesn't come into my mind. So you're saying multi-document "summarization" maybe the next step of consumer automatic summarization? There are many research about multi-document summarization, and will look into it.

It seems like your comment was well intended, but you come off as a bit presumptuous.

The problem TODAY is not whether or not a computer can summarize, but rather to what extent we as humans are satisfied with the computer's summary.

In some cases a dumb summary is good enough (first 200 characters for example). Given this baseline, and a target (human summary), you have to admit it's really an incremental process.

well put, hayksaakian. Also, never underestimate the built in auto-correct of the human mind :) There will always be a market for expert-curated approaches, but sometimes it's just cheaper to algorithmically "Crunch" it. Sometimes RAIN MAN counting toothpicks is enough, but when you need Ramanujam... :D

Also, do keep in mind... this is 2 hrs worth of coding time late on a sunday night. I don't have a CS degree, just a utilitarian/curious programmer who sometimes is stupid enough not to realize how hard a problem I'm tackling. :) Someone better qualified can do a much better job. Sometimes "just good enough" is good enough! :)

People are inherently biased. It's impossible for any person to read news and not inject their own personal tendencies into a summary they write.

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