Columbia Newsblaster

Columbia Newsblaster is a system to automatically track the day's news. There are no human editors involved -- everything you see on the main page is generated automatically, drawing on the sources listed on the left side of the screen. Every night, the system crawls a series of Web sites, downloads articles, groups them together into "clusters" about the same topic, and summarizes each cluster. The end result is a Web page that gives you a sense of what the major stories of the day are, so you don't have to visit the pages of dozens of publications. Newsblaster is an academic project from the Natural Language Processing group at Columbia University's Department of Computer Science. It is designed to demonstrate the Group's technologies for multidocument summarization, clustering, and text categorization, among others. It is funded under DARPA TIDES and KDD and has been operational online since September 2001.