I have been looking for a long time for some good text summarisers. Looks like we may be getting there soon. Ted Leung writes:
The posts about text summarization have stirred up some good activity. Kellan Elliott-McCrea has done a nice comparison of the Mac OS X summarizer, libots, and Classifier4J. Among his discoveries: there is no system API to the Mac OS X summarizer. Surely this is a sick joke. One of the supposedly wonderful things about closed source, Objective-C based, heaven on earth, Cocoa nee NeXTSTEP was the ability to provide system wide services in a cool way. Boo.
Eager to get a better comparison, Nick Lothian the author of Classifier4J has put up a web app so that people can test the quality of Classifier4J’s summaries.
For a long time I’ve wanted a text summarizer that I could use as a system service. It looks like there’s some healthy incentive for the authors of these three systems to keep improving them. Information distillation, here we come.
