Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
how often the main verb in a relative clause is strongly associated with a
particular person, compared to how often that verb occurs in the whole
corpus of source material. Verbs that occur very frequently across all text
and are associated with several different people, such as “get”, “like”, “in-
tend” and “think”, are deemed to be promiscuous and are ignored, while
those verbs that are associated with fewer people are deemed to be more
significant as descriptors of those people.
The Columbia University group has also developed a much more
general summarization system called Newsblaster that automatically
tracks the news of the day. Every night the software crawls around sev-
eral news sites on the Internet, downloads articles, groups them together
into clusters of articles about the same topic and produces a summary
article on each topic. The end result is a summary of the news generated
entirely by a computer program, complete with links to source articles
on other Web sites.
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The following article appeared on the Newsblaster
site on the day after the final TV debate in the 2004 presidential elec-
tion campaign. The program not only wrote the article, it also wrote
the headline and determined that the summary, which was based on 51
source articles, related to U.S. news.
Bush defends his presidency, Kerry makes case for change in final
debate
(U.S., 51 articles)
Analysts say the debate's importance had grown after strong per-
formances by Senator John Kerry in the first two debates were fol-
lowed by rising support for him in opinion polls. Among regis-
tered voters who watched the debate, 42 percent called Kerry the
winner, 41 percent said US President George W Bush won and 14
percentcalleditatie.KerrysaidWednesdaynightthatBushbears
responsibility for a misguided war in Iraq, lost jobs at home and
mounting millions without health care. Kerry said on Wednesday
Bush had not done enough to protect America from another attack
while the president labeled his Democrat rival's approach to pre-
venting terrorism as “dangerous”. There is a frantic feel to tonight's
final presidential debate as both campaigns see the confrontation
as their best remaining chance to take control of a race that enters
its final three weeks in a dead heat. Moran closed saying that Bush
campaign officials admit Kerry has an advantage on health care but
believe a strong showing tomorrow night would introduce voters
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Newsblaster is available at
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/newsblaster/.
