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.
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"I get sick and tired of reading the same story on different web sites"
So you read Slashdot, where they are happy to post the same story over and over, on different days?
I get sick and tired of reading the same story on different web sites. That's why I like slashdot so much.
I'm sure most will agree with me when I say that this makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE.
Well, there's the answer to the Ask Slashdot from a couple of days ago.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Wouldn't that kind of go against the part where he said "I get sick and tired of reading the same story on different web sites"?
...whether this will include the obscure stories that are actually interesting, or whether it'll be just a rehash of the major stories that we can find in ten or twelve other places.
Our company has been running a similar service for a very long time. It's free, and you canget it here. It's called NewsScape.
Sounds like a good idea, but I'm worried about the "Newsbots" objectivity. If I wanted to read a bunch of stories about the latest NVidia GeForce 4 release, 10 reasons more RAM is better, and why you should upgrade your hard drive, I'd just watch TechTV.
It hurts when I pee.
Looks like subscriptions can be axed, Slashdot won't need editors anymore!
Although, it will only be possible to replace slashdot's editors with the newsblaster program if they can implement some sort of misspelling and false information algorithm.
The List of Grievances with Slashdot.
http://newshub.com/
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.
This is a somewhat dangerous trend, IMHO. CNN Headline news gives us blurbs...soundbites...with no substance. "Israelis shot Palestinians" or vice versa on a daily basis. Little reporting of substance of negotiations; why there was a conflict in that location at that time for what reason. The great thing about the internet is that there is great reporting in depth. I like to check out the Drudge report, BBC, disinfo.com, etc on a regular basis to get a good blend of various points of view so that I can make my OWN opinion. I don't want to be served watered down sentence fragments by a corporate AOL/TimeWarner beheometh. Slashdot is one of a few exceptions to this rule, since they typically link to articles of substance and allow for dialogue and debate by (usually) intelligent users. The moderation system isn't perfect, but it helps dodge the trolls. My guess is that automated summaries will lose the flavour of good journalism/writing, and by taking an "average" will end up with a C+ "factual comprehension" review as opposed to multiple A+ "theory" and "syntehsis" editorials.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Check out this odd story about incarcerated Browns. The summarizer could apparently still use some manual supervision.
So where's the slashbox for it?
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
This is usually Copyright Infringement - Fair Use Doctrine is not applicable.
Every one of these paraphrasers lift large chunks of syntax.
I would maintain that this is still a plagiarsist or copyright violation unless it is done really well.
And it never will be done really well unless NeuralNetwork chips are common and mankind has advances in Artificial Intelligence research. Five years away at best.
I dare the commerical services to hit Enyclopedia Britannica. Or I dare them to routinely slurp New York Times and boast that they digest the New York Times..
A massive Civil Suit is awaiting some of these early adapters planning on creating a business out of this.
And they deserve it.
It is just "Word Twiddling", however useful.
If the twiddling is done live, once, per user client, then maybe its OK, but none of these business models are setup THAT way.
What are the copyright or other legal issues to republishing news stories collected from web sites? The Newsblaster site clearly states where the information comes from - like every good college student is taught to cite information sources. On the other hand, on the bottom of many of the stories is the notice: "Copyright 2002 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed." Is collecting and condensing news stories "republishing" - does this violate copyright stuff?
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"
I suspect that U.S.A. today has been using a similar technology for years now to generate their "McNews".
I don't see any concrete information on what it does to summarize stories...is it using something like Cyc? Does it just have some heuristics for picking out the important parts of paragraphs?
Also, who else thought "neuro-linguistic programming" for at least a moment when they saw "nlp"?
Those. clowns. in. Congress. did. it. again.
What. a. bunch. of. clowns.
I want to read today's news today. I can pick yesterday's paper out of the trash can. They're still speculating on how Holy Cross will make out against Kansas. (Hello, the game was last night. Kansas won.)
1. yahoo's my start page. I get to see up to 4 possibly-relevant news articles.
2. Fark. I get my good share of the weird news, and of course NewsFlash articles, which are just links to other news sites. I'm happy.
The article in the Online Journalism Review says: "Newsblaster seems to make things somewhat generic or more conservative, especially when summarizing reports over several days. This can take away the editorial edge or nuance that a reporter or editor might use to make a lead or report powerful. Summarizing news over several days in this approach results in a certain staleness."
I noticed the "blandness" of the summaries too, but I think that's a benefit-- reading CNN stories can get really tiring after a few minutes since everything has to have as much punch as possible.
HOWTO get better dates on slashdot
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.
This new averaged, filtered, genericized "news" is exactly the kind of crap suited to a society that spawned "Judge Judy" and "A Current Affair". Sure, it's a nice piece of technical wizardry, but all things clever are not useful or worthwhile.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I have yet to figure out exactly what his point is in a story, so it would be really interesting to see software try and handle it.
Of course, it did say it summarizes NEWS stories.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
As the summary here shows there are still a few kinks in the system.
/.
While I have to agree with some people that this isn't in-depth reporting I do think that it is pretty interesting AI. When it comes down to it the problem is not that a computer might be summarizing our news. The problem is twofold.
Firstly people are not always inclined to look beyond summaries. When faced with typical time constraints people prefer to look at summaries because they do not have time to search across a dozen sources and articles. This is why USA today became big in the first place. Nothing there is more than 1 column long. (Incidentally did anybody else find it hilarious that this system "summarizes" USA today who themselves summarize other news sources?)
Secondly much of the news is the same. News is big business and most major news media tell the stories that sell. Because they are all targeting the same markets they tell the same stories and in the same ways. Therefore there is little difference between CNN, the NY Times, etc in terms of tone and "facts". Especially since much of "their news" comes from the same wire services such as Reuters. Fox News is different but that is because they have abandoned the mantle of impartiality and become all conservative all the time.
In essence this system is perfect for the internet news style. Breif summaries of facts followed by more "in-depth" leads that we may peruse as we wish. The real question is, when will this begin drawing on sites like Indymedia, The Register and
Basically, it looks at the headlines on Yahoo/Reuters, and finds sentences that scan as 5/7/5, and uses Perl cleverness to present them as a little news haikus (or senryu, if you wanna be picky). It's great stuff:
I'm hooked :)
They have archives going back to the beginning of 2001, with only a few holes (e.g. the days after September 11), and they talk about how they are doing everything. Bonus points: you can have the haiku headlines mailed to you automagically every day. I just hope they have the bandwidth (etc) to withstand Slashdot....
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Wrong on every count.
/. gets is news from other places and is always hours or days late with it. The worst thing you can do is get all your news from one source.
/. (And my favorite of your list "USA Today") Sometimes you get more information than contained in a story merely by seeing how different people report the story! Reading one paragraph summaries of the days news will tell you nothing at all. Maybe worse, mislead you due to there not being enough information.
Besides the fact that
Every news site has some kind of slant to it. CNN, NPR,
I read news from about 10 sources a day and if I see multiple articles that I'm not interested in they're easy to skip. If I am intersted in them I read them on all sites. You get much much more information that way.
Though you do need to pick your sites. If you look at CNN, MSNBC and Salon and all three are merely parroting Reuters then you know your not doing yourself any good.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
www.newsnow.co.uk does similar stuff I guess, but is the summary builder the thing 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.
Why would fair use not be applicable?
Slurping a sentence or two from an 5-25 paragraph article and quoting it with attribution is considered fair use, right?
I'm not clear on if they're quoting and attributing it sufficiently to meet a legal challenge however. IANAL. But it's not the open and shut case you make it out to be as far as I can tell.
--LP
What if we have two such automated news services and they scan each other? Wouldn't they get stuck in some sort of infinite loop where they repeatedly pass the same story back and forth, summarizing it over and over again?
http://news.google.com/
It indexes a huge array of news sites several times a day for fresh stories - enter a search term and it will bring up all the headlines it can find for that subject. Best of all, it uses an algorithm to identify alternative coverage of any one story and lists these links in a block beneath the main search results. That way you get links to several different accounts of the same story (although in practise they end up being pretty similar due to using the same news agencys) without having to hunt around for them yourselves.
They're still working on the algorithm and are requesting as much feedback as possible - read more here.
Their sorce pages look like verbatim copies from the other sites -- clearly a copyright issue, no?
I think this would be pretty cool if they could add some sort of a SOAP/XML-RPC type interface where you could query on sections, stories, whatever. It would be nice to allow content syncing like this.
I was writing about this in response to a post in a user's journal the other day that even better would be to make a story content P2P system where you could allow story distribution. You might place a limit and only allow the summary to drive people to your site, but it could still help with bandwidth issues. This would basically be like an enhanced RDF/RSS type system but over a P2P type network you wouldn't even really have to host your own feeds for people. Add in some sort of DB persistance and you could just say "get new headlines and summaries from site x"--the system would bring in all the new content. Anyway, that is just a dream I have and probably will never happen the way some people feel about their content.
The original poster is correct. This is essentially automated plagiarism. Here's why.
The service claims to be a computerized summary. However, in terms of copyright, a summary is something that expresses the same idea using different words. Therefore, using exact quotes and labelling them as a summary is a textbook case of plagiarism.
Nathan
I think you are confusing plagarism, and a violation of copyright. I am primarily concerned with the legal issue of Copyright violation raised by the previous poster, not an amorphous ethical one.
As Bitlaw points out, under the Copyright Act, four factors are to be considered in order to determine whether a specific action is to be considered a "fair use." These factors are as follows:
1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Dang, clicked the submit button by mistake.
Attempting to apply the four factors there, while some could be argued either way, I can see that on balance, you both might be right. I could probably make a stronger case that it doesn't qualify as fair use, than that it does, based on those four factors. I think I was focusing over-much on the "amount taken" criteria and overlooking the others.
--LP
I've been using Newshub for 2 years now, does essentially the same thing.
newshub.com
I am pretty sure that plagiarism is a de facto copyright violation. You are using another author's words without proper credit. Even if the author is cited in the "summary," the definition of a summary is that the words are the authors, not the cited person's words. If they are going to use the author's exact words, it needs to be labeled as an "auto-quote" generator, rather than a summary.
Nathan
...but rather in identifying multiple documents that appear to be talking about the same thing. Summarization is a well-researched (but not well-perfected) NLP topic, but finding inter-document similarities is quite a bit more challenging. This is easy for me and you to do when we read something, but think about what it takes to get a machine to do this. Take a look at some of the examples--you'll find that although large chunks may be verbatim from document to document (especially ones that rehash standard news feeds like Reuters and AP), most articles have a different wording or spin on each idea.
:wq