What's The Latest? A Question-driven News Chatbot
This addresses the need for interactive news consumption for general readers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing chatbot and question-generation methods.
The authors tackled the problem of creating an engaging news chatbot by automatically organizing articles into topical chatrooms and integrating generated questions, with a usability study showing users successfully engaged in multi-turn conversations about specific news stories.
This work describes an automatic news chatbot that draws content from a diverse set of news articles and creates conversations with a user about the news. Key components of the system include the automatic organization of news articles into topical chatrooms, integration of automatically generated questions into the conversation, and a novel method for choosing which questions to present which avoids repetitive suggestions. We describe the algorithmic framework and present the results of a usability study that shows that news readers using the system successfully engage in multi-turn conversations about specific news stories.