Summly: intelligent news summarisation

Sorry, this isn't rocket science at all.<p>Standard clustering algorithms (found in any off-the-shelf natural text processing library) and text summation with libots should suffice for most of the heavy lifting.<p><a href="http://tldr.it/" rel="nofollow">http://tldr.it/</a> <a href="http://libots.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://libots.sourceforge.net/</a><p>Further, most news articles' first paragraph is a practical (although you may have not noticed) summary.<p>Coming from NLP, unless you can influence the source and the source being Web, the story should be an 80%-20% in the <i>best</i> case -- and you'll work VERY hard to correct the remaining 20%, and you WILL remain with a percentage of content you just can't summarize properly.<p>What <i>would</i> make a difference is a real people-driven summation, not machines (see what voicebunny did for text-to-speech, for example). And yes, it would have been fun to combine the two as well.

From the looks of the website, the video and what the apps does, it looks like the idea got too much funding.<p>Cmo'n they even have a famous person in their clip!<p>Most news sites already give a summary in an RSS feed. This is most of the time sufficient.<p>I think that a good idea should sell itself, not with all this fancy pancy.<p>-- Facts: 17 year developer got a $250.000 funding <a href="http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/12/17/meet-the-16-year-old-whose-summly-app-notched-up-17k-downloads-in-4-days/" rel="nofollow">http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/12/17/meet-the-16-year-old-w...</a>

For a majority of news articles, the first three sentences is usually more than perfect as a summarization method -- feature stories on the other hand are <i>insane</i> (and that's why we have things like Lexical Chains: <a href="http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/W/W97/W97-0703.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/W/W97/W97-0703.pdf</a>)

Is he doing extraction or abstraction? I'm doing a research about automatic summarization and also creating an app for it. Summly and my idea has a different approach but I'm curious in some aspects of how summly summarizes articles.<p>I think last year, Summly was pulled out in the app store. Back in those days, the quality of there summary is not that impressive. I'm still downloading the app and will check its performance.

Here's [1] an interview Nick gave just a couple of hours ago on Bloomsberg.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/video/slacker-16-year-old-whiz-launches-app-snags-250m-5co3OFUER_CoLdymHYScOQ.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.bloomberg.com/video/slacker-16-year-old-whiz-laun...</a>

Relevant news story about this from December 2011: <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16306742" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16306742</a><p>I think things have been fairly quiet for a few months pending this re-launch.

Off-topic, but does anyone know what sneakers Nick D'Aloisio is wearing in the video with Stephen Fry?<p>Looks like they have a slate gray upper, white soles, and a prominent logo on the tongue.<p>Edit: For anyone who's wondering, they're Gourmet Footwear[1].<p>[1] - <a href="http://gourmetfootwear.com/" rel="nofollow">http://gourmetfootwear.com/</a>

Very impressive design / interface. The summaries help me decide which articles to read in full, as opposed to being abridged versions of the full stories. Still useful, but not a substitute for my Times Digest (<a href="http://www.timesdigest.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.timesdigest.com/</a>).

The Summly blog mentions about a demo to "let people enter a web site’s URL and receive a summary of the content."<p>Anyway to still use that? The idea sounds very exciting and an online bookmarklet can super-useful to TL;DR anything.

Great application. similar to Circa in a way but I think Circa's user experience and notifications are better.

That is a seriously large iPhone at the bottom right of the landing page.

"To use Summly pls use Chrome, Firefox or Safari"