Xref: utzoo comp.multimedia:636 comp.ai:9532 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!spool.mu.edu!munnari.oz.au!metro!socs.uts.edu.au!dragon!osborn From: osborn@socs.uts.edu.au (Tom Osborn) Newsgroups: comp.multimedia,comp.ai Subject: Re: Personalised News Systems Message-ID: Date: 25 Jun 91 01:35:46 GMT References: <13510@pt.cs.cmu.edu> Lines: 41 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.