Updating users about time critical events

Abstract

During unexpected events such as natural disasters, individuals rely on the information generated by news outlets to form their understanding of these events. This information, while often voluminous, is frequently degraded by the inclusion of unimportant, duplicate, or wrong information. It is important to be able to present users with only the novel, important information about these events as they develop. We present the problem of updating users about time critical news events, and focus on the task of deciding which information to select for updating users as an event develops. We propose a solution to this problem which incorporates techniques from information retrieval and multi-document summarization and evaluate this approach on a set of historic events using a large stream of news documents. We also introduce an evaluation method which is significantly less expensive than traditional approaches to temporal summarization. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.