Re: Advice request for tinysvm package description
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.
> 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.
>> 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."
>>> 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.
>
> I think "topic spotting" is more specific than "text categorization":
> you can classify documents by topic, by language, by style, ... "topic
> spotting" covers just the first one.
I wasn't being particularly careful about this since we're not
claiming to be exhaustive - these are *examples* of applications for
SVMs. But okay.
> Image classification and biosequence analysis may also be included though.
(In fact I only bulked it out to get a three-item list. Everybody
likes three-item lists!)
>>> 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.
You can give the binary packages related short descriptions, like:
SVM trainer and classifier toolkit - development files
[...]
> 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.
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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