Our paper “The Concentric Nature of News Semantic Snapshots: Knowledge Extraction for Semantic Annotation of News Items“ has obtained the Best Paper Award at K-CAP 2015. It have been four amazing days at Palisades sourrounded by great people and discussing about the last trends on knowledge discovery and explotation. Take a look at the proceedings if you want to explore by yourself.

In this work we try to automatically recreate the context of international news, so potential consumers can easily understand and explore it. Single news articles that we daily consume often give a limited picture of the story being reported, which is insufficient to properly capture the story behind. We leverage on the information available on the Web to bring back other important aspects of the article and provide a broader picture of the reported news. The authors propose a concentric-based approach that enables to represent the context of a news item in terms of relevant entities that play a role in the story the so called NSS (News Semantic Snapshot). Candidate entities are collected via named-entity recognition and entity expansion. Relevant entities are harmonized into a single model based in two layers: the most representative ones (the Core), which are spottable via frequency measures, and the ones that are semantically attached to the former (the Crust) because of different reasons: informativeness, serendipity, popularity, etc. Slides are also available online:

Concentric Semantic Snapshot from Jose Luis Redondo Garcia

At the same time, I also presented the short paper “Capturing News Stories Once Retelling a Thousand Ways“ with very good feedback during the poster session. In this paper we focus in the adequacy of the News Semantic Snapshot and its graph-based concentric nature to support the different phases of the news consumption process, from the early stages when the user does not even know what he wants to consume, to the early steps where he is already and expert and wants to focus in the fine-grained details of the story.

But it was not all about work. The amazing conference venue including pool and foosball tables, swimming pool, gym, basketball court... was the perfect scenario to put in practice our social and sportive skills:

See you in K-CAP 2017!