Ask HN: What product can be built around automatic summarization algorithms?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4717344

by MojoJolo • 14 years ago

5 20 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi, I have an automatic summarization algorithm for web articles (extraction only). What product can be built from it? Or how can it be used as a startup product?

schoash2• 14 years ago

Create an API and sell access to it. Later if you come up with an idea, you can still build it.

MojoJolo7• 14 years ago

Who can be the target market for those APIs that I will sell?

saurik• 14 years ago

How much per call, and how long is the output? Example of quality?

schoash2• 14 years ago

App developers.

l1ghtm4n• 14 years ago

How about summarizing blog posts for twitter?

gtmtg3• 14 years ago

I don't think that has been done - that might be worth exploring and would definitely be cool...

MojoJolo7• 14 years ago

This is a cool idea. But the algorithm only extracts the most important sentences. What will happen is it will just tweet the most important sentence in the blog post (considering that it's 140 characters or less).

mcrider• 14 years ago

Is it multidocument summarization? I wrote a term paper on this back in school some years ago and though the technology is very interesting, it left a little to be desired (so I wonder what the state of the art is now). The applications I studied for this are removing bias in e.g. news articles, critic's reviews, etc.

MojoJolo7• 14 years ago

Mine is only single document summarization. Yes, it's an interesting technology but I think there is not much of improvement.

gtmtg3• 14 years ago

Summly (http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/12/17/meet-the-16-year-old-w...) does exactly this... It was created by a 16-year-old and generated tons of press, getting VC funding and all...

It's worth noting that the app website is down and it's not available on the App Store anymore; however, according to their Twitter feed, a new version is supposed to be released soon...

MojoJolo7• 14 years ago

Tried Summly, as a matter of fact, it is included in my related systems. I don't know what happen to them that they don't exist as of today. Well, in my opinion, it doesn't summarize that good.

You also might want to check Cruxbot (http://www.cruxbot.com/).

gtmtg3• 14 years ago

Summly seems to have been redesigned (http://summly.com)... It looks pretty cool, at least from their website and a few sample summaries...

arvindevo• 14 years ago

Maybe, summarize the text of emails for people who receive lots of email each day.

yolesaber2• 14 years ago

You could build a studying / note-taking app. Feed in source articles (textbook, PDF, et all) and have it automatically generate outlines. Customizable SparkNotes. This could be useful to every student in the world.

MojoJolo7• 14 years ago

Can extracted sentences be considered as outline?

yolesaber2• 14 years ago

The summary for the TechCrunch article you posted below reads to me like an outline. As long as the extractions encapsulate the main themes and ideas of a certain piece, they would be viable study tools.

jclos• 14 years ago

Have you benchmarked it on some standard IR collections (TREC-DUC comes to mind)?

Ask HN: What product can be built around automatic summarization algorithms?

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