Research from Northwestern U.: Tell Me More, Finding the Facts that Online News Leaves Out
Automatically "enhancing" and updating a news story (with newer content) is currently being developed at the Intelligent Information Lab at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.
Even the most conscientiously crafted news story can leave out information that might have changed your opinion. Some may even do so deliberately. A prototype web service changes that, by sourcing additional quotes, figures and other information to augment any given online news article.
Unlike existing news aggregators or "related stories" features, the new service, called Tell Me More, presents (fresh details without repeating information in the original story) and other material left out of the original story (for a variety of reasons).
[Snip]
The software then trawls Google News, Yahoo News or other news aggregators to find related articles. These are analysed in the same way as the original story so that a comparison can be made to uncover any information not included in the initial article.
[Snip]
By subtracting named entities, quotes and numbers from one document to the other you can determine what information is genuinely new," says Francisco Iacobelli of Northwestern University, who co-developed Tell Me More.
"We then characterise this information as additional actors, figures or quotes and present the information next to the initial story."
Iacobelli intends Tell Me More to give readers a more balanced view of events by presenting them with additional and perhaps conflicting information not included by their initial news source.
Two More Points:
1) As pointed out in the article, Tell Me More might have some serious copyright issues to overcome.
2) The software is not for public use.
You can read about a test that New Scientist conducted using Tell Me More software near the conclusion of the article.
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