What's The Latest? A Question-driven News Chatbot

TL;DR

This paper introduces a news chatbot that organizes articles into topics, generates questions to facilitate engaging multi-turn conversations, and employs a novel question selection method to enhance user interaction.

Contribution

It presents a new algorithmic framework for an automatic news chatbot with question generation and selection, improving user engagement in news discussions.

Findings

Users successfully engaged in multi-turn conversations

The system effectively organizes news into topical chatrooms

The question selection method reduces repetition

Abstract

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.