Slashdot Mirror
Computers Summarize the News
oily_ants writes "I get sick and tired of reading the same story on different web sites. That's why I like slashdot so much. Good (??) summaries of all of the stuff out there on the net. Now there is a project at Columbia University by the nlp group that attempts to generate computer summaries of all of those news articles on different web sites. The project is called Newsblaster and the summaries are excellent. You can read about the project on regular news sites like Online Journalism Review or USA Today."
news.google.com. Just released yesterday. I haven't yet played around with it enough to say whether it's cool or not, but it does look promising.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
To tell you the truth, at first I thought the summaries were TOO good; I was suspicious that it wasn't really automated.
But after looking at a few more stories, it looks like it just pulls sentences out of the stories that seem to have a different point to make, and strings them together.
Sometimes you see some redundancy and some non-sequiturs, but I have to admit the illusion is pretty good.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
It's just a rehash of all of those other stories. But the nice part about it is it is in reader's digest condensed version. I only have to read one small paragraph to get the major points of the event instead of sifting through a long article that doesn't include much actual information. It is meant as a summary so the information is NOT the obsure stuff (which is interesting) but quick and dirty summaries of important events.
www.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/newsblaster/
although I found some of the summaries slightly shallow, they are not bad.
The problem is that it becomes an average of opinion, when you sometimes need that longer insightful article. This easily could become the news of sheep everywhere.
This could be bad when facts come in to contradict initial impressions.
oops
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
No you provide a basic news grouping and ordering service, this sumarizes the articles based off of many different sources. This is sort of like Slate's Today's Papers feature except for articles and not just the days news.
I'd do something interesting, but my server can't handle a slashdotting.
Here are some papers about Newsblaster and computer text summarization in general.
Reserach Papers
I'm not sure if they've done anything really novel. I skimmed through one of the more recent papers, on sentence ordering; but that seem to only operate on the same event There's research like this going one at alot of major universities like CMU and MIT. That said, it does look impressive.
Humorless sig goes here.
Check out newsseer It was written by the same people who wrote citeseer, the great research index.
And don't forget http://catalogs.google.com/ for online searching of mail-order catalogs. (They scan 'em, OCR 'em, and make 'em searchable.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I've been using Newshub for 2 years now, does essentially the same thing.
newshub.com
Check out the Center For Intelligent Information Retrieval (UMASS) CIIR for their project on Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT). Not only does this categorize(assign topics to) news stories as they break, but it attempts to automatically group stories together as they break. I worked for them this summer (on a different project), and these are some really brilliant guys and girls!