What's The Latest? A Question-driven News Chatbot
Philippe Laban, John Canny, Marti A. Hearst

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.
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