News In Essence: Summarizing: ONLINE NEWS TOPICS.

The article presents information about NewsInEssence (NIE; www.newsinessence.com), a news delivery and summarization system under development at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. NIE acts as the user's agent to gather and summarize related online news articles. Given a user's topic specification, NIE searches across dozens of news sites to collect a group, or cluster, of related stories. It then generates a summary of the entire cluster, highlighting its most important content. NIE retrieves news articles from online news sources around the globe. In addition to nearly 20 U.S. sources, NIE retrieves news from the online versions of British, Canadian, South African, and Australian newspapers, as well as English language versions of online newspapers from India, Singapore, and China, among others. The central object in NIE is the cluster, which consists of a number of topically related news articles. For each document in a cluster, NIE displays the article's title, source, publication date, and original universal resource locator.