🚀 go-pugleaf

verber@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu (Mark Verber) writes:

>In article <13510@pt.cs.cmu.edu> mickey@a.nl.cs.cmu.edu (Raman Chandrasekar) writes:

>   ... a system (?prototype)... MIT Media Lab, ... extracts news ...
>   ... relevance to a  *particular* reader, and customizes it to 
>   the reader's preference, and presents it to her in a multimedia 
>   electronic form.

>A paper about this system can be found in the most recent proceedings of
>Usenix:

>Multimedia - For Now and the Future
>USENIX Summer '91 Conference Proceedings -- June 10-14
>Newspace: Mass Media and Personal Computing, Page 329-347

Well, the Media Lab isn't the only group working on this. GMD in
Darmstadt has been working on the (huge number of) problems for
a while and expect to release a prototype systems soon. The non-
prototype version is expected for September (but I don't know which
September).

I must admit some doubts about this. I had a postgrad student working
on something a bit like this a few years ago (automatic indexing and
content addressable retrieval). Some that retrieval from headlines and
intro paragraphs is fraught with problems - the key words are there,
but so is a lot of attention attracting hype. Manual key-wording is a
possible fix, but it seems that non-experts are poor at this (they 
devise keys from their own perspective well, but for readers badly).

Educating writers or demanding a higher editorial standard may be
the only way. Ie, for whatever reason, news contains a lot of noise.

Also, the *personalised* customising is very problematic. Eh?

Tomasso.
--
Tom Osborn,                        
School of Computing Sciences,        " Beware of the small carrots "
University of Technology, Sydney,
PO Box 123 Broadway 2007,  AUSTRALIA.                          R H-M.