One of my friends Anand Kishore along with some of his friends at Yahoo built a nice Text summarising app “Dygest” using the Search Monkey and some other SDKs. Their nice achievement is they say they were able to write a statistical text summarising algorithm. Now I don’t have the details of the algorithm with me, but what I could see from the summary was that it was HELPFUL. So first up Kudos to you guys, Good Job. Next I was kind of intrigued by the thought how they must have done it, and that set my brain rolling and I started reading what they must have done.

Few Observations I made about their results,

1. Very well presented. , I am not good at web design and stuff so I really admire that.

2. Their results (sentences) were just too well formed to be machine generated. So, I was like where did they come from?

3. First hunch was, may be they just put out most interesting sentences.Which turned out to be partly true, their sentences are infact “picked” as is from the source text. But they put entire sentence so that it reads well, and also they probably put more than one sentence in order to make it sound coherent. They might also be doing some grammar analysis before putting the sentences together.

So these things were going in my head and I was like what would it take to pick up meaningful sentence form the text, the simplest thing. Then I set out to write my own code to do the same. I pulled from net a python script that could extract text from a url (it is not so powerful, but works). Then I took two web pages returned by Dygest for search term “Stimulus” and converted it to text using this python script. I wrote a small perl script to clean the text and build a matrix of the form “paragraph X words” and then scored them based on the number of meaningful words contributed by the paragraph. Here meaningful words are the words that are left after striping out the stop words (put together by searching some stop list online). The paragraph with maximum score is selected as the representative for the article.

I know this is really naive method of doing things, but I wanted to validate the thought I had in mind about the ability of this idea. And it turns out it stands validated. I don’t have results with me on this machine right now to put up here but will do that once I go home. Also, I was surprised as it did select some of the really good paragraphs as a answer.

There are a few variations I would have liked to try but did not, here are those.

1. Use a better importance measure.

2. Add more granularity to the text selected. I could easily go to sentence level and then show the top 3 sentences as answers.

3. Use second order context similarity for the search term and the paragraph selected. This would be really interesting but is a lot more involved and I did not have enough time.

All in all, it was fun app that it turned out. I will be uploading it soon here so keep watching this post or email me if you are in a real hurry. But again I don’t claim that the code is a top class code and is the best way to go. It is one of the way to go though. I also want to thank Andy (Anand Kishore) who’s post (Dygest) I mentioned before, inspired this act of mine.