Comments on: Asimov’s 4th law: A robot will not tweet.

By: chris

chris — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:44:21 +0000

Thanks everyone for the feedback. I've had a bit of a fine tune and played with a few more articles (thank @sarahbourne). See the new post here. I'm still only taking conceptually but it addresses some of the points raised.

By: OlegR

OlegR — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 19:30:51 +0000

Do you think we can have this bot work as a private API?
I’m sure cmswire, foliomag and others would love to try it out :) and see the power of text mining

By: Sarah Bourne

Sarah Bourne — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:56:27 +0000

Brilliant! Please feel free to test your clever bot on the @massgov twitter feed. I’d love to see the results.

By: chris

chris — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:49:07 +0000

I’ve done a number of things. First off, NSummarizer is being asked for a single sentence fragment. Usually this is small enough to fit in. In the cases were it is still to long I do some progressively aggressive shortening techniques: reduce conjunctives (“and” to “&”, for example); removing punctuation; etc.

It’s true that you will always faced with the programmatic problem that a 140 character restriction presents but by using a more concise and relevant string you can minimize the need for brute force truncation.

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 12:41:12 +0000

How are you assuring NSummarizer keeps the Tweet within the specific character limit of Twitter? Are you relying on Twitter to change a long URL into a TinyURL

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 08:31:09 +0000

Thanks for the comment Avi. I’m not sure about getting Pepsi blog posts but I can certainly republish some copylefted content (probably Wikipedia). Watch this space.

By: Avi Rappoport

Avi Rappoport — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:26:47 +0000

Promising, but too small a data sample. Could you do 25 pepsi blog posts and see what happens?