About

I got the idea for Tl;dr after talking to my friend at this hackathon. We were at first trying to hack away at audio Discretization, something we learned would take a lot more than a few days to accomplish. We needed something that was both doable, but also impactful to some extent by its innovativeness. She pointed me toward making a bot of some kind, some automatic, but when I was given that suggestion I started considering the potential in automation, and automatic summarization ended up being the best idea I could get out of that train of thought.

The project

Simply put, it's a summarizer. Perferbly taking chunks of text consisting of 2 or more sentences, will shorten the text and get the important parts, and turn them into a semi-functional sentence. There are two modes. One mode is the Teal Deer mode. (tL;Dr) Ths mode will give you a fairly easy-to-understand summarization that is roughly similar to the original text, but usually half in length. The other mode is the Black Deer mode. (bD;Dr) This mode is hardcore and will convert entire essays into singular sentences. Sentences tend to be only a line long for these and are usually very dense in meaning.

Challenges

Maintaining the meaning of people's words, and trying to say less while keeping at least 60% of the meaning intact was difficult. I had to analyze linguistic patterns and recognize correlations between the subject, verb, and object of a sentence to know when and where it'd be best to extract critical information.

Learned

What this project has shown me, and what the few other projects I attempted to start on that same day had shown me, is that software engineering is only 25% coding and debugging. The part that really takes up that larger portion of time is considering the best way to approach the situation, and trying to construct a nearly perfect system of logic that will achieve the goal you set out for. Spending hours studying grammar, and looking at passages myself has really shown me that programming isn't really just programming since the logic of what makes up every fields in the world has to be maintained and grow upon by us.

Built With

• python