Query-Free News Search

Many daily activities present information in the form of a stream of text, and often people can benefit from additional information on the topic discussed. TV broadcast news can be treated as one such stream of text; in this paper we discuss finding news articles on the web that are relevant to news currently being broadcast. We evaluated a variety of algorithms for this problem, looking at the impact of inverse document frequency, stemming, compounds, history, and query length on the relevance and coverage of news articles returned in real time during a broadcast. We also evaluated several postprocessing techniques for improving the precision, including reranking using additional terms, reranking by document similarity, and filtering on document similarity. For the best algorithm, 84–91% of the articles found were relevant, with at least 64% of the articles being on the exact topic of the broadcast. In addition, a relevant article was found for at least 70% of the topics.