NewsFinder: Automating an AI News Service

The software combines a broad search of online news sources with topic-specific trained models and heuristics. Since August 2010, the program has been used to operate the AI in the News service that is part of the AAAI AITopics website. The goal for NewsFinder is to publish a small, select set of news stories that are of general interest to the AI community and to provide categorization metadata to help readers scan for stories that match their specific interests. A news story may be assigned to a single category or to multiple categories (for example, Robots and Vision). Google News is driven by readers' queries to find stories containing a set of keywords from thousands of news sources.