Automatic Summarization in Reddit

Last time, I tried TextTeaser in Medium. But how about on Reddit?

This is a second part of my automatic summarization posts. You can read the first part here. It was entitled Automatic Summarization in Medium. I decided to have a series of post about automatic summarization application in popular websites.

For brief explanation, TextTeaser is an automatic summarization API based on the algorithm I formulated in my MS CS degree. The algorithm does extraction which extracts the most important sentences on an article. I tried it on Medium to see if it really works well. It exceeds my expectations.

Then a friend made a Reddit bot that uses TextTeaser. It follows some subreddits like /r/worldnews, summarizes the articles, and post it in the comments. The bot’s Reddit account already got 5k+ comment karma since starting yesterday and still receiving overwhelming positive feedbacks.

Here’s a post that is currently in the top of Reddit’s front page:

Top post in the front page along with the TL;DR summary.

The comment made by the bot is the top comment in that thread. It also got some awesome and funny replies.

Here is another summary made by the bot. It holds highest score in the comment and also in bot’s summaries:

This was a comment in “Gays Bars’ Ban on Russian Vodka Is Going Global”.

You can see more summaries made by the bot in its user page.

Reading the replies by people regarding the bot made me laugh. It really made my day today. Most of them are good, others are not that good. And it’s awesome that some of them didn’t realized that it was automatically generated. Well, someone suggested that it can be used to keep up with the news. Just bookmark /u/tldrrr.

To those who are curious, you can try the API in Mashape. If maybe you might want to email me, here’s my email: jolo@textteaser.com. Or just say hi to me at Twitter (@MojoJolo).

Credits to Ben Adrian Sarmiento for the awesome Reddit bot.