Preprint: “Telling Breaking News Stories from Wikipedia with Social Multimedia: A Case Study of the 2014 Winter Olympics”

Here’s a new paper by Thomas Steiner, a Google engineer in Germany.
The paper will be will be presented in one week at the 1st International Workshop on Social Multimedia and Storytelling (SoMuS), co-located with the 4th International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR ’14), Glasgow, Scotland.

Title

Telling Breaking News Stories from Wikipedia with Social Multimedia: A Case Study of the 2014 Winter Olympics

Author

Thomas Steiner
Google Germany

Source

via arXiv

Abstract

With the ability to watch Wikipedia and Wikidata edits in realtime, the online encyclopedia and the knowledge base have become increasingly used targets of research for the detection of breaking news events.
In this paper, we present a case study of the 2014 Winter Olympics, where we tell the story of breaking news events in the context of the Olympics with the help of social multimedia stemming from multiple social network sites. Therefore, we have extended the application Wikipedia Live Monitor-a tool for the detection of breaking news events-with the capability of automatically creating media galleries that illustrate events. Athletes winning an Olympic competition, a new country leading the medal table, or simply the Olympics themselves are all events newsworthy enough for people to concurrently edit Wikipedia and Wikidata-around the world in many languages.
The Olympics being an event of common interest, an even bigger majority of people share the event in a multitude of languages on global social network sites, which makes the event an ideal subject of study. With this work, we connect the world of Wikipedia and Wikidata with the world of social network sites, in order to convey the spirit of the 2014 Winter Olympics, to tell the story of victory and defeat, and always following the Olympic motto Citius, Altius, Fortius.
The proposed system-generalized for all sort of breaking news stories-has been put in production in form of the Twitter bot @mediagalleries, available and archived at this https URL.

Read the Complete Paper (13 pages; PDF)

Resources

1. Wikipedia Live Monitor
2. @MediaGalleries
3. Google Engineer Releases Wikipedia Live Monitor App for Breaking News Coverage (April 25, 2013)

Filed under: Journal Articles, News