Succinct Queries for Linking and Tracking News in Social Media
Luchen Tan, Charles L. A. Clarke · 2014
Given a current news article, we wish to create a succinct query reflecting its content, which may be used to follow the news story over a period of days, or even weeks. In part, the need for succinct queries is occasioned by limitations of commercial social media search engines, which can perform poorly with longer queries. We start by applying established key phrase extraction methods to the article, creating an initial set of candidate query terms. We then generate a series of probe queries, each a subset of these candidate terms, which we apply to search current social media streams. By analyzing the results of these probes, we rank and trim the candidate set to create a succinct query. We present an experimental study of this method based on a collection of news articles taken from March-April 2014, with the resulting succinct queries used to re-query social media one week later.