Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

Want to play with a fun tool? I’ve made the text summarizer we used in TailRank public.

TailRank uses the summarizer to reduce posts to 1-2 sentences when it discovers cool memes. It’s pretty solid and I’m really proud of the design. It’s not perfect though. There are some real-world scenarios where it becomes confused.

Sentence boundary isolation is still an active research area. The main problem is that rules for parsing English were not developed with humans in mind. Most languages developed before the advent of Turing machines.

Right now I think it’s 80% successful. The cool thing is that it doesn’t return false-positives.

Anyway, play with it and let me know what you think. If you notice any bugs just click the button at the bottom to submit a report and I’ll fix it.