NewsBoy: an interactive news retrieval system

1. NewsBoy: an interactive news retrieval system Joemon M Jose The Information Retrieval Group Department of Computing Science University of Glasgow Email:- jj@dcs.gla.ac.uk http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~jj UITV 2004

2. Outline • Background • Online News retrieval • Scenario • Personalisation and Presentation Strategies • System interface • Future Work

3. Background • news programmes • Multiple channels • Regular update • Information overload • User requirement • May not be interested in all news • Need an overview • Interested in selected topics • Interested in latest news

4. Information Retrieval • Users information need (Query) • Retrieval strategies • Interactive issues • Browsing, results presentation • Embedded in other applications • Personalisation • Adaptive, context sensitive retrieval • Online news retrieval

5. NewsFlash System We present a world exclusive - Saddam Hussein in his own words….At the weekend, the veteran labour politican Tony Benn travelled to Baghdad to meet and interview the Iraqi President….You are conscious of the role that Iraqis have set out for themselves, inspired by their own culture, their civilization and their role in human history….Having said that, the Iraqis are committed to their rights as much as they are committed to the rights of others

6. Video Indexing & Retrieval • Video programmes + Subtitles • Hauppauge video capture card • AVI file format, DivX codec • Video Shot segmentation • Result of a single camera action • Colour histogram based approach • Shot, subtitle alignment • Using time stamp in subtitles • Key frame extraction • thumbnails

7. Retrieval and summarisation • Shot + Corresponding teletext is considered as a document • Vector Space retrieval model • Representation using term vectors • Query is represented using query term vectors • Cosine similarity match • Query based summary generation • Summary of a document • Tailored with respect to the query

8. NewsFlash System We present a world exclusive - Saddam Hussein in his own words….At the weekend, the veteran labour politican Tony Benn travelled to Baghdad to meet and interview the Iraqi President….You are conscious of the role that Iraqis have set out for themselves, inspired by their own culture, their civilization and their role in human history….Having said that, the Iraqis are committed to their rights as much as they are committed to the rights of others

9. Scenario • TV Broadcasts • set-top box • Users • Information overload • Wants to see only interesting news • Couch potato culture • Remote control based interaction • No keyboard, • Relaxed environment

10. Strategy/Issues • Simple interaction strategies • Couch potato environment • Intuitive browsing • Remote Control • Up and down arrows • Colour coding • Selection buttons • Personalisation

11. User side… • Wants to know late breaking news • Plane crash somewhere … • Any major events • Users have interests • Capturing their interests • Glasgow news, war on terrorism, football news etc. • Needs to capture their profiles • User specific input • From interaction • Needs to know about something

12. Document Clustering • We cluster shots into groups • Single pass clustering • Based on the subtitles • As a result, we can present the daily news as groups of shots • Each group contains shots belongs to same topic • Crude story segmentation

15. Learning Techniques • Identify patterns of usage • If a person continuously accessing Glasgow weather reports • Then he/she is interested in that topic • Prioritise/weight areas of interest • Present according to priority • Present late breaking news • Role of clustering iTV

16. Profile Learning • Self-adaptive profile • Adapt without explicit feedback • Capture the profile with multiple factors • A profile P is comprised of a set of profiles pi • If a user views a document then that is used as an indication of interest • Similar to single pass clustering • Strength of profiles

17. Presentation of personal news • News shots are grouped with respect to the profiles • Highest strength profiles are shown first

19. Evaluation Issues • Interaction strategies • Retrieval effectiveness • Quality of profiles • User satisfaction • Task based user-centred evaluation • Provide scenarios of usage • Continuous usage over a week • Logging and questionnaire based data capture

20. Future Work • Topic & Event detection • Use of IR techniques • Story Segmentation • Personalisation techniques • Adaptation within search sessions • Long term adaptation • Group Personalisation • Integration with Internet • Evaluation Strategies