Performing fusion of news reports through the construction of conceptual graphs

Abstract

As events occur around the world, different reports about them will be posted on various web portals. Different news agencies write their own report based on the information obtained by its reports on site or through its contacts – thus each report may have its own ‘unique’ information. A per- son interested in a particular event may read various reports about that event from different sources to get all the available information. In our research, we are attempting to fuse all the different pieces of information found in the different reports about the same event into one report – thus providing the user with one document where he/she can find all the information related to the event in question. We attempt to do this by constructing conceptual graph representations of the different news reports, and then merging those graphs together. To evaluate our system, we are building an operational system which will display on a web portal fused reports on events which are currently in the news. Web users can then grade the system on its effectiveness.