The Horizons of News SearchSSM Workshop 2010By Richard McCreadie, Craig Macdonald, Iadh Ounis

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How is News reported?

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Observer

The public witnesses event

Reporter

Reporters arrive and write an article

Internet

NewswireCompany

Newswire companies publish

the article

Observers now report events online

Both publicly

Instant Messaging Logs

And implicitly . . .

News is commentated on and

discussed . . .

. . .. . .

. . .

Event!

How do we access that news?

• Integrated News Search– – – – etc . . .

• News Aggregators– – – – etc . . .

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Motivations for Improving News Search

• Improving real-time search– Detect events more quickly (freshness)– Classify user queries more accurately– Attain a better coverage of news stories– Enable the serving of a wider definition

of `news’

• Improve coverage in news results– Avoid institutional bias of newswire

companies– Provide a sample of `public opinion’

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What’s the latest news from the SSM

Workshop?

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How can User-Generated Content Help?

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Detect news-related queries for recent news stories for which there aren’t any news articles

Improve confidence in

classifying queries based

on news discussion in

user –generated content

Display `first source’ for a news story

Provides content for new news

articles with few prior articles

Provide a sample of

`public opinion’ about a news

story

Mitigates institutional bias in news articles

Freshness Volume

ClassifyingUser Queries

RankingResults

Challenges to be addressed

• Confidence– How can we know when a source is

trustworthy?– Inaccuracies/falsification/spam?

• Quality– Does user-generated content really add

value?– How to distinguish `good’ posts?– What sources should we include?

• Coverage– What stories class as news?– How to distinguish between real events

and `chat’?– Should results be diversified?

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Outlook

• Users now act as both reporters, commentators and consumers of news

• This creates exciting possibilities in leveraging the rich information they produce to improve news search

• CR: TREC Blog track, Top News Stories Identification

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News