Re: Advice request for tinysvm package description

[Giulio Paci <giuliopaci@gmail.com>]

Hi again!

Il 13/08/2012 17:10, Justin B Rye ha scritto:
> Giulio Paci wrote:
>>>   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").
>>
>> I saw this use of the plural quite often, including the Wikipedia page
>> describing this technology:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_vector_machine
> 
> There's no reason not to use the plural when you're talking about
> SVMs.  But that WP page doesn't talk about "an implementation of
> SVMs".  This package isn't an implementation of several support vector
> machines, it's an implementation of the SVM technique.

Ok, got it.

>> Do you think I should not explain the acronym?
> 
> Explain or expand?  Expanding the acronym is very easy, and can be
> achieved in passing.  Explaining it is difficult and may not be
> necessary.

Expand, sorry. :-)

>>>   for the 
>>>   problem of pattern recognition.
> [...] 
>> This sentence is saying that TinySVM has been developed to perform
>> pattern recognition. This is one of the typical uses of SVM, but TinySVM
>> has been designed for it (i.e., it may be more straightforward to use it
>> for pattern recognition rather than for classification). However you are
>> right that we can drop it.
> 
> That's a fragment of information I hadn't spotted.  It might almost be
> worth adding a sentence to the end of the main paragraph: "TinySVM is
> an implementation specialising in pattern recognition."

Added.

>>>> 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?
>>
>> Actually I copied the libtinysvm-dev description. But the tinysvm
>> package has the same description, without the last sentence.
> 
> It would have been handy if you'd told us that.  After all, apt-cache
> doesn't know about this package yet.

Sorry again, it was not my intention to post last sentence. Nevertheless
it has been useful, as both tinysvm and libtinysvm-dev descriptions seem
better now.

> You can give the binary packages related short descriptions, like:
> 
> 	SVM trainer and classifier toolkit - development files

Good idea.

>> How would you change this description for the libtinysvm-dev package?
>>
>> Do you think I can use
>>
>> "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 text categorization,
>> hand-written character recognition, and image classification.
>>
>> This package contains the development files."
> 
> That would be okay, or if you're saying "development files" in the
> synopsis it might be better to be more informative here - something
> like:
> 
>   This package provides development headers for TinySVM.

Summarising:

1) tinysvm short description is unchanged:
"SVM trainer and classifier toolkit"

2) libtinysvm-dev description is:
"SVM trainer and classifier toolkit - development files"

3) Both packages share this common long description:
"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 text categorization,
hand-written character recognition, and image classification. TinySVM is
an implementation specialising in pattern recognition."

4) tinysvm description includes this sentence at the end:
"This package provides tools for developing SVMs with TinySVM."

5) libtinysvm-dev package includes this sentence at the end:
"This package provides development headers for TinySVM."

Thank you again. The descriptions seem much better now.

Bests,
	Giulio.