Paper Reading #19: Tell Me More, not just “More of the Same”

Comments:
Comment 1
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Reference Information:
Title: Tell Me More, not just “More of the Same”
Authors: Francisco Iacobelli, Larry Birnbaum, Kristian J. Hammond
Venue: IUI  

Summary:
The authors discuss the current problems with online news stories all being too similar. To combat this they discuss the Tell Me More system which searches for the same new story, but only returns results that have something new to offer rather than more of the same. Some content that could be considered additional is additional quotes, actors, figures, or information. The Tell Me More system uses five core models to find this new information; content gathering, content filtering, text analytics, difference metrics, and presentation. In content gathering the system searches for articles that are similar to the source article. Content filtering removes documents that are exactly the same or too different from the source. Text analytics creates a statistical model of every paragraph and document for comparison. Difference metrics compares the statistical model to find the best articles with new information. Finally, the presentation module ranks all documents based on the difference metrics.

Discussion:
This seems like an incredibly useful technology. One current problem with the internet is that there is such an overflow of information it can often be difficult to find anything new or useful. Having a system such as this could make surfing the internet more enjoyable. This could also be used in academia for finding new sources that are not simply a rehash of old articles.