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Now a team of U-M researchers headed by Assistant Professor Dragomir Radev has developed NewsInEssence, a free, Web-based service that automatically collects and summarizes multiple, related news stories about any topic or event you choose. NewsInEssence's summaries are automatically refreshed as online news sources provide updates.

NewsInEssence is a free, Web-based service that automatically collects and summarizes multiple, related news stories about any topic or event you choose.

"The value in having NewsInEssence," Radev points out, "is that news readers can quickly gather information about a given news story from multiple sources, thus providing them with different perspectives on the same news topic."

For example, a user could choose to follow news about the war in Afghanistan or the latest stories about a corporate merger. NewsInEssence would then cull news stories from CNN, the BBC, MSNBC, USA Today, Yahoo, and others on the chosen topic and would create a summary of these stories to the user's specifications. Customizability makes NewsInEssence different from other news-gathering services: users can specify the length and frequency of news summaries, which can also be delivered to them via E-mail.

The NewsInEssence research team is directed by Assistant Professor Dragomir Radev.

"In comparison to other similar systems on the Web, NewsInEssence is personalized and interactive," Radev explains. "It allows users to specify a 'seed story' or topic, to specify which sources they prefer and how long the search should take, to say how long the summary should be, and to decide how often updates should be sent to them."

Radev notes that NewsInEssence is a work in progress and an example of how students -- while contributing their expertise as they learn new concepts in information search and retrieval, computer science, and linguistics -- can provide a valuable public service. Soon to be added is a Web-based, natural language search query that will allow users to ask a question like, "When was the president of France inaugurated?" and get a concise answer.

Radev directs the ongoing research project with graduate students from the School of Information and students from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Radev holds a joint appointment with both academic units.

The National Science Foundation Information Technology Research program provided partial funding for the research.

The bulk of the programming was carried out at U-M by the multidisciplinary Computational Linguistics and Information Retrieval group. Adam Winkel of the College of Engineering; Michael Topper of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; and Sasha Blair-Goldensohn, a 2001 graduate of SI, were the primary student programmers. The backend summarization software, MEAD, was developed under Radev's direction at a workshop last summer at Johns Hopkins University and has been placed in the public domain.

Try out the free service at http://www.newsinessence.com.