From Contextual Search to Automatic Content Generation: Scaling Human Editorial Judgment
Larry Birnbaum
Center for Innovation in Technology, Media and Journalism
Northwestern University
Stuart Building 204
Monday, February 7th, 2011
11:30AM - 12:30PM
Abstract: Information systems that present people with information inescapably make editorial judgments in determining what information to show and how to show it. However the editorial values used to make these determinations are generally invisible to users and in many cases even to the engineers who design them. This talk describes some of the problems that this creates, based mainly on an assessment of intelligent information systems that we have developed at Northwestern. We then discuss some methods for providing explicit and visible editorial control in such systems, and present a variety of systems we have developed that utilize these approaches. These range from systems that provide news readers with additional detail and background, to systems that automatically generate stories from data.
Slides (PDF)
Bio:
Larry Birnbaum received his PhD in computer science from Yale
University in 1986, and joined the Northwestern faculty in 1989. His
research in artificial intelligence and computer science has
encompassed natural language processing, case-based reasoning,
machine learning, human-computer interaction, educational software,
and computer vision. Birnbaum has authored or coauthored more than
eighty articles. He was the program cochair of the 1991
International Machine Learning Workshop and has been a member of the
program committee for numerous other conferences and workshops.
