Summary Efficiency Analysis

[kouloumos]

Overview

This analysis is designed to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our summarization process across three different platforms: Delving Bitcoin, bitcoin-dev mailing list, and lightning-dev mailing list.

We're examining the relationship between the length of original posts and their corresponding summaries across different threads and post types. This information is crucial for understanding how well our summarization algorithms are performing and identifying areas for improvement.

You can find the code for this analysis here.

What We're Calculating

1. Summary to Body Length Ratio: This is the primary metric we're using. It's calculated by dividing the number of words in the summary by the number of words in the original post body.

   • A ratio less than 1 indicates that the summary is shorter than the original post
   • A ratio greater than 1 means the summary is longer.

2. Average and Median Ratios: These give us a sense of the typical compression rate of our summaries. An ideal average might be around 0.3, meaning summaries are typically about 30% the length of the original post.

3. Distribution of Ratios: This shows us how consistent our summarization process is. A tight distribution around the mean suggests consistency, while a wide distribution might indicate inconsistent performance.

Results by Platform

The following table presents a comprehensive comparison of summarization efficiency metrics across Delving Bitcoin, bitcoin-dev mailing list, and lightning-dev mailing list.

Metric	Delving Bitcoin	Bitcoin-dev Mailing List	Lightning-dev Mailing List
Overall Statistics
Number of posts analyzed	1,633	460	4,273
Average summary/body length ratio	3.29	0.60	0.65
Median summary/body length ratio	1.49	0.45	0.39
Original Posts
Count	200	85	772
Average ratio	1.23	1.06	0.96
Median ratio	0.69	0.89	0.50
Average body length	917.9	547.8	653.3
Median body length	489	318	380
Average summary length	316.0	288.5	202.9
Median summary length	329.5	305.0	173.0
Replies
Count	1,433	375	3,501
Average ratio	3.58	0.50	0.58
Median ratio	1.61	0.37	0.37
Average body length	194.5	1001.4	751.6
Median body length	115	621	495
Average summary length	219.9	240.1	198.3
Median summary length	217.0	238.0	171.0
Distribution of Ratios
0-0.5	7.65% (125)	55.00% (253)	63.84% (2,728)
0.5-1	20.58% (336)	27.83% (128)	30.40% (1,299)
1-1.5	22.35% (365)	11.96% (55)	3.39% (145)
1.5-2	15.06% (246)	1.96% (9)	0.51% (22)
2+	34.35% (561)	3.26% (15)	1.85% (79)

Key Observations:

1. Delving Bitcoin shows significantly higher summary/body length ratios compared to the mailing lists, particularly for replies.
2. The mailing lists (bitcoin-dev and lightning-dev) demonstrate more consistent and efficient summarization, with the majority of summaries being shorter than the original posts.
3. Original posts tend to have higher summary/body length ratios compared to replies across all platforms, but this difference is most pronounced in Delving Bitcoin.
4. The distribution of ratios varies greatly between Delving Bitcoin and the mailing lists, with Delving Bitcoin having a much higher proportion of summaries longer than the original posts.
5. Bitcoin-dev mailing list shows the highest average body length for replies, suggesting more detailed discussions in this forum.

Visualizations

(click on images for better quality and zoom)

Distribution Plot

Shows the frequency of different ratio ranges, helping us understand the overall performance of our summarization process.

Thread Comparison Plot

A log-scale scatter plot comparing body length to summary length across all threads. This helps identify overall trends and outliers

Multi-Thread Plot

Individual plots comparing body length to summary length for top 48 threads.

Delving Bitcoin

bitcoin-dev list

lightning-dev list