An App to Boil Down Online User Reviews

An anonymous reader writes "Is this a glimpse at the future of the Semantic Web? A new startup named Pluribo has developed a technology that can auto-summarize user reviews on the internet. It is a Firefox extension that can take a webpage filled with reviews and condense it down into a couple of sentences. Currently, it just works with Amazon electronics, but the potential seems incredible. Ars Technica took an in-depth look."

Comments

Quick.

[Slashdot Suxxors]

Somebody fix this so it work's on /. Maybe then I'll RTFA.

First Post

[Harmonious Botch]

I for one welcome our hot grits pouring overlords.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Al Gores in Soviet Russia releasing Duke Nukem Forever, you insensitive clod!

In Korea, only old Natalie Portman must be new here.

All your Linux are belong to us Sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to our heads.

1)Stephen King is dead

2)BSD is dying

3)Profit!

There. Fixed that for you.

Here, let me test

[Anonymous Coward]

Enter> The Wicker Man, 2006

Result: "Sucks monkey balls"

Hey, it really does work!

One problem

[Rob Kaper]

The application seems to assume that the best summary is the one with the most correlation to the other posts, in other words: the most common viewpoint. While that may work fine for user reviews, in most cases the viewpoint of the masses is usually not the best.

Re:One problem

[Vectronic]

...or focus on a few outliers?

Yes, probably more than half the time actually, because 90% of the reviews are about as accurate as Slashdot comments, or as accurate as that percentage I just made up.

When it comes to hardware, I may work a bit better, however with the diversity of hardware that exists, that one comment that you missed saying "but don't EVER purchase this and install it if you have an [Insert Product]!" might be exactly what you need to know and the rest is just fluff. The same goes for a lot of software, and you might miss out on that "great find" by that one guy that said "its ok, but it's less efficient/configurable/easy and more glitchy/resource hog than [Product X]"

Re:One problem

[billcopc]

Precisely: I like reading about the edge cases, because Joe Random is a freaking moron when it comes to electronics.

The whole "me too" effect is a huge part of today's marketing. That's why everyone and their mother wants a freaking iPod/iPhone.

Re:How about a comment synopsis generator

[Rob Kaper]

I'd love to get a one page summary of all the informative, insightful and interesting comments.

[url=http://slashdot.org/~Rob+Kaper]Here you go[/url].

Re:How about a comment synopsis generator

[Rob Kaper]

Joke's on me, this time, I guess. *sigh*

Okay, now here's a request:

[Penguinisto]

...is there any way to have it filter out the obvious astroturfers and trolls?

Seriously, any big-name product or service will have a coterie of fanboys (or paid astroturfers) who will praise something no matter what, and a flock of trolls who will point out everything wrong with it, no matter what.

...now how do you filter those out?

Do that, and it'd be one hell of an advancement in filtering. :)

/P

Re:Okay, now here's a request:

[Dachannien]

I was going to post something similar. I was apartment shopping earlier this year, and the amount of astroturfing and astrotrolling* was incredible.

Any filter that decreases the amount of information that I can use to evaluate the "truthiness" of a review is a bad thing. What's more, if filters like this catch on, people will be selling FEO (filter engine optimization) services to game the filters with their astroturf, and then the reviews will become completely useless.

* In case I just made up a word, what I mean by "astrotrolling" is people who post shit about a product to get people not to buy it because they have a separate axe to grind against the seller. In the case of apartments, it's often poor tenants who tore up the apartment/broke the lease/got evicted and still amazingly expected their security back.

A reflection of the times.

[plasmacutter]

This is a serious reflection of our current times, where people's eyes gloss over if the concept at hand is not condensed into a convenient sound-byte.

I suppose you could call it the bleeding edge where complacency meets the loss of freedom and the fall of darkness where critical thought once stood.

Now there is enough probable demand to launch a startup designed to remove what minimal labor people are interested in dedicating to the quality of even their leisure time.

I'm sure many fantasize about strangling people this lazy/complacent, but honestly if they're unconscious enough not to care about their own toys, do they really possess a "life" for you to take from them?

I'm to lazy to read TFA

[mrroot]

can someone boil it down to a couple sentences for me?

Ugh. The opposite of what I want.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ugh.

This sounds like the opposite of how to get useful information out of reviews, and more like the "consumer products" equivalent to the automatic resume scanner.

You know the resume scanners I'm talking about -- the ones that circular-file the candidate who took three years off work to get his Ph.D. in cognitive science (and whose thesis is a perfect fit for your business plan), preferring, instead, the guy who listed "20 years PROLOG, PL/1, BASIC, C, 10 years C++, 5 years Java, MCSE, A+", because obviously the second guy triggers more buzzwords. Because the HR drone won't understand any of the resumes, he/she just picks whichever one the scanner selects, and that's typically the one with the fewest career gaps and the most buzzwords. ("But that other Ph.D guy only has one or two languages, this guy has six! And that Ph.D guy's been out of work for three years, so obviously nobody would hire him!")

Ten reviews reading "Works. Fast, cheap, lightweight" and three reviews reading "Doesn't work" don't tell me anything, other than that the product might have reliability issues.

One review reading "Didn't work the first time. The manual doesn't mention that you have to make sure the jumper is in the correct position first, and then it works. I own an XYZ-123 and this new product was at least as fast, but at about half the price. Weighs about a pound." tells me everything I need to know -- that the three people who claimed it didn't work almost certainly didn't know how to configure it correctly, and that the first seven reviewers never had a problem because they weren't part of the edge case.

Re:How about a comment synopsis generator

[xant]

Man, you guys really don't know about Alterslash yet?