ABSTRACT

Man Bites Dog: finding and analysing interesting news reports

Emma Byrne Department of Computer Science, UCL

The most interesting information in news reports is often that which is unexpected. Human beings harbour expectations about the world and, when these are violated, interest arises. In the Man Bites Dog framework we capture these expectations as logical formulae and, by treating reports and background knowledge as logical formulae we can identify unexpected news by capturing logical inconsistency. The framework provides a sound basis for an implemented system which can take structured text news reports and return those reports which are interesting together with a rating and reasons for that interest.

The Man Bites Dog Framework is being developed as part of the Newstools Project. More details can be found at http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/research/newstools/index.html.

Maintained by rbennett@cs.ucl.ac.uk