Re: Advice request for tinysvm package description
Giulio Paci wrote:
> I need advice from native English speakers about the following package description:
>
> "TinySVM is an implementation of Support Vector Machines (SVMs), for the
> problem of pattern recognition. Support Vector Machines are supervised
> learning models with associated learning algorithms and have been proven
> suitable for a large number of real-world applications, such as text
> categorization, hand-written character recognition.
>
> This package contains development files required to use TinySVM into
> your own application."
(ITP #668874 also has the short description "SVM trainer and
classifier toolkit" which is obscure but probably okay, assuming it's
true that it trains and classifies SVMs...)
> Is this correct English? Can anyone help me to improve this?
It does have a few flaws.
TinySVM is an implementation of Support Vector Machines (SVMs),
This use of the plural seems mildly odd, and the expansion of SVM has
the drawback that Wikipedia thinks explaining what a "support vector"
is requires about a page of equations (and terms like "biased
hyperplane"). On the other hand Fermi lab just boils it down to
"those points in the input space which best define the boundary
between the classes" which might even be worth trying to fit in here.
for the
problem of pattern recognition.
That's a bit awkward grammatically. And is it describing TinySVM or
SVMs in general, and is it saying that they perform pattern
recognition or that they do something obscure to pattern recognition
systems?
One buzzword that turns up a lot is "perceptron"; might that belong
somewhere in this description too?
The next sentence is so much more useful that I would suggest just
dropping the first one completely... after all, the synopsis has
already said that TinySVM is (an implementation of) an SVM.
> Support Vector Machines are supervised
> learning models with associated learning algorithms and have been proven
> suitable for a large number of real-world applications, such as text
> categorization, hand-written character recognition.
That either needs an "and" instead of the comma or a third item on the
list. Google shows people giving the same first two items followed by
"image classification" and sometimes "biosequence analysis, etc."
Do we have to call it "text categorization", though? Google tells me
it's also called "topic spotting", which seems a bit clearer.
> This package contains development files required to use TinySVM into
> your own application."
This has slightly wonky grammar, but more importantly it makes it
sound as if this is "libtinysvm-dev". Is that true? Does the package
with this description contain header files and so on, or is it the set
of binaries with names like svm_learn and svm_classify?
So here's an attempt at a revised version:
Description: SVM trainer and classifier toolkit
SVMs (Support Vector Machines) are supervised learning models with
associated learning algorithms, and have been proven suitable for a
large number of real-world applications, such as topic spotting,
hand-written character recognition, and image classification.
.
This package provides tools for developing SVMs with TinySVM.
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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