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<Paper uid="N03-4008">
  <Title>Columbia's Newsblaster: New Features and Future Directions</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="1" end_page="1" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
3 Different Perspectives
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> When news media report on international issues, they reflect the perspectives of their own countries. In the past, Newsblaster has included all international sources as input to its summaries. Recently, we have added a feature of &amp;quot;international perspectives&amp;quot; to the system. In addition to the universal summary for a particular event, which includes all international sources, Newsblaster now generates separate summaries for each country, which may illustrate unique biases or disagree on facts. The Newsblaster interface allows users to view any pair of summaries side by side to compare different perspectives.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="4" start_page="1" end_page="1" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Summary Rewrite
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Newsblaster also currently includes a module for rewriting summaries to achieve better readability. References to people are rewritten so that the first mention includes theperson's fullnameandaselecteddescriptionandlater mentions are restricted to last name only. In addition to improving readability, the rewritten version of the summary is usually shorter than the version before rewrite, since multiple verbose descriptions of the same entity are discarded. These changes can be seen when comparing the summary sentence with the original document via a link from the summary using a proxy.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="5" start_page="1" end_page="1" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Event Tracking and Updates
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Newsblaster currently identifies events within a single day; a new set of clusters is generated each day. We have designed a new module for tracking events across days, allowingthesystemtorelatestories publishedononeday to closely related stories on other days. In this way, the user can more easily track events of interest as they unfold. Thetypicalapproachfortrackingeventsacrossdays represents eachevent as onemonolithic set ofstories. We havefocused instead ona model whereeventsononeday candivide intorelatedsub-eventsonthenext day. Forexample, a set of stories about the start of the Iraq war is an eventthatcanbranchintomultiplesets ofstories,eachset representing a different facet of the war. We are currently determining anappropriate evaluation ofthis approach as well as investigating different possible interfaces.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Ifauseristrackingeventsacrossdays,itismoreuseful to have a summary that provides updates on what is new as opposed to a summary of similarities across all days.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> We have built a prototype update summarizer that scans new articles extracted by the system and compares these newarticles with a backgroundcluster onthe same event.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The summarizer will provide the user with a summary of only important new developments. As the tracking module locates new articles, it will pass these to the update summarizer, which will determine what, if anything, has changed. This summarizer uses more syntactic and semantic information about the articles to determine noveltythanisusedinourothersummarizationstrategiesand null thus, efficiency is a challenge. We will demo these componentsinaseparatelyfromNewsblasterastheyhavenot null yet been integrated in the development version.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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