Aggregate documents: making sense of a patchwork of topical documents

With the dramatic increase in quantity and diversity of online content, particularly in the form of user generated content, we now have access to unprecedented amounts of information. Whether you are researching the purchase of a new cell phone, planning a vacation, or trying to assess a political candidate, there are now countless resources at your fingertips. However, finding and making sense of all this information is laborious and it is difficult to assess high-level trends in what is said. Web sites like Wikipedia and Digg democratize the process of organizing the information from countless document into a single source where it is somewhat easier to understand what is important and interesting. In this talk, I describe a complementary set of automated alternatives to these approaches, demonstrate these approaches with a working example, the commercial web site Wize.com, and derive some basic principles for aggregating a diverse set of documents into a coherent and useful summary.