Because who has time to read whole articles?

August 18, 2016 9:03 AM

Explain To Me is an automatic text summarizer, that utilizes TextRank, a graph based algorithm to scan through the contents of a website and extract a concise machine generated summary. Python Code
posted by signal (23 comments total)

Does it work on mefi election threads?
posted by vuron at 9:08 AM on August 18, 2016 [11 favorites]

I was excited, until my 10 sentence summary of an Atlantic article was "CONTINUE READING" x10.
posted by pickingoutathermos at 9:14 AM on August 18, 2016 [7 favorites]

Does it work on mefi election threads

First thing I did. I just got who posted it and a favorites count.
posted by Artw at 9:20 AM on August 18, 2016

It doesn't seem to like Wikipedia pages either, which is going to be limiting.
posted by Artw at 9:20 AM on August 18, 2016

It choked on the Wikipedia page for general relativity, so I tried some shorter pages and it performed...not great. The 10 sentence summary for "patent" doesn't include any of the sentences in the Wikipedia article's own initial summary paragraphs, so it reads more like a set of 10 random facts about patents, as though one were absentmindedly flipping through a textbook.

Even giving it 20 sentences to work with doesn't improve the result.
posted by jedicus at 9:22 AM on August 18, 2016

I was excited, until my 10 sentence summary of an Atlantic article was "CONTINUE READING" x10.

That raises an intriguing possibility - extending this into They Live-style decoding.

site: http://www.wsj.com/public/page/editorials.html
summary: OBEY. HATE. CONSUME. DESPISE. SERVE. THIS IS YOUR GOD.
posted by The Gaffer at 9:22 AM on August 18, 2016 [15 favorites]

tl;dr
posted by Fizz at 9:25 AM on August 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

I cut and pasted ~30K words from the recent election thread into a wordpress page and got:

goose.article.Article object at 0x7f6d4a608910

...which I guess is as good a summary as any.
posted by Huck500 at 9:27 AM on August 18, 2016 [7 favorites]

okay what's the easiest way to get all my metafilter comments into this? I think maybe it could help me figure out what, if anything, I've been trying to get at all this time.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:37 AM on August 18, 2016 [4 favorites]

> goose.article.Article object at 0x7f6d4a608910

ugh are we just going to re-litigate goose.article.Article object vs duck.article.Article object in this thread too? haven't we already been over this like a billion times?
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:41 AM on August 18, 2016 [8 favorites]

Metafilter: posted by dfm500 at 6:35 AM - 21 comments

[ more inside ]posted by storybored at 9:03 PM - 85 comments

posted by p3on at 8:34 PM - 29 comments

[ more inside ]posted by chainsofreedom at 5:06 PM - 35 comments

[ more inside ]posted by Fizz at 3:57 PM - 35 comments

[ more inside ]posted by Too-Ticky at 11:40 AM - 184 comments

[ more inside ]posted by philip-random at 12:11 AM - 29 comments

[ more inside ]posted by J.K. Seazer at 6:36 PM - 20 comments

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[ more inside ]posted by Fizz at 12:57 PM - 27 comments
posted by biogeo at 9:54 AM on August 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

Description

The Ass Blaster is the term for the third and final morph/stage of the Graboid's life cycle, the...

10 Sentence Summary

The Ass Blaster differs from the Shrieker in three significant ways: It possesses wings; it has a rocket-like ability to launch itself into the air; and it has the ability to lay eggs.

This ability to fly is the result off the Ass Blaster's most unique trait in which the Ass Blaster works two chemicals into it's tail section.

The Shriekers then metamorphose into Ass Blasters, each of which lays at least one egg to produce more Graboids.

However another theory has Ass Blaster as a solitary egg layer as when Ass Blasters shriek they do not release the same amount of heat as a shrieker, because unlike Shriekers who are designed to alert each other when they find food, ass blasters are more solitary animals and do not as much need for them to signal each other about food sources...
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 10:00 AM on August 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

Explain To Me summarized in 1 sentence: "Website is broken."
posted by Schadenfreude at 10:16 AM on August 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

It choked on the Wikipedia page for general relativity

Aww, I was hoping for something like fragments of facts remembered from only studying the evening before a big test:

"Uh, the further the one twin is away from the other the... um... heavier he gets? Which is something Einstein came up with while using a flashlight on a train."
posted by Cironian at 10:22 AM on August 18, 2016

I tried the Mother Jones prison article and got "application error."
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:42 AM on August 18, 2016

Some of the subreddits have a script running that makes a TLDR summary (if I recall right it is called tldrbot) any time you submit a link to an article from a source it recognizes, like a newspaper or magazine website.

The ones I have read were not good.
posted by bukvich at 10:56 AM on August 18, 2016

Yeah, this seems to not work very well at all from what I've fiddled with. The description seems to be nothing more than the first two lines (up to some set limit of words), and the rest of the NNN lines appear to be nothing more than an even spread of NNN lines out of the total. Cutting sentences in half (particularly quotes) seems to be the order of the day, also.

Maybe there are some articles out there where this thing does a decent job on, but so for I think you'd get much better results by simply using Microsoft Word and copy-pasting the text of the article into it, and then running AutoSummerize.
posted by Old'n'Busted at 11:35 AM on August 18, 2016

This is a really difficult NLP problem. I would be shocked if there was any halfway decent domain-general summarizer.

When we finally start to see that kind of thing, hopefully within the next few years, it will not be based on this kind of algorithm.

(This kind of thing could still be useful. It's just not going to do what it says on the tin.)
posted by grobstein at 2:15 PM on August 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

Also, the "Python code" link seems to indicate that this is just a wrapper around the library implementation of TextRank provided by sumy. Not that there's anything wrong with that, necessarily, but the presentation had me thinking something more was happening here.
posted by grobstein at 2:20 PM on August 18, 2016

... Having learned a little more about what's going on, though, I want to moderate my pessimism in the previous comment a tiny bit. Moderates pessimism. There.
posted by grobstein at 2:21 PM on August 18, 2016

This may or not be amusing once they get it working. (I'm unable to decode the meaning of 'CSRF token missing or incorrect'). I guess we've been recruited to do alpha-testing?

As a reader I long ago learned how to scan texts. I'm sure as hell not handing that capacity over to some robot ... documented or not.
posted by Twang at 3:55 PM on August 18, 2016

Works fine for me.

Works "OK" with mainstream/4th grade level news articles. Fails at most everything else. To be fair, most news articles you could (should?) be able to figure out the gist of the article in the first 10-20 sentences.

I guess, like some others, I'm not sure of the benefit here.

(Also, whenever I picked 10 sentences, many of the "sentences" were 100+ words long. That's not easier to read. But yeah, pretty useless so far.)

Here are two vague, rambling articles for which I'd like an abstract:

http://www.thefader.com/2016/08/09/joanne-the-scammer-branden-miller-messy-bitch-interview

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/18/the-labyrinthine-mini-mall-of-lesser-evils-versus-minimum-superego/

App doesn't do it so well.
posted by mrgrimm at 4:01 PM on August 18, 2016

I tried it on one of my verbose and rambling blog entries - I got back something shorter but not really any more coherent. Garbage In, Garbage Out I guess.
posted by AndrewStephens at 12:43 PM on August 19, 2016