Search engine reinforced semi-supervised classification and graph-based summarization of microblogs

There is an abundance of information found on microblog services due to their popularity. However the potential of this trove of information is limited by the lack of effective means for users to browse and interpret the numerous messages found on these services. We tackle this problem using a two-step process, first by slicing up the search results of current retrieval systems along multiple possible genres. Then, a summary is generated from the microblog messages attributed to each genre. We believe that this helps users to better understand the possible interpretations of the retrieved results and aid them in finding the information that they need. Our novel approach makes use of automatically acquired information from external search engines in each of these two steps. We first integrate this information with a semi-supervised probabilistic graphical model, and show that this helps us to achieve significantly better classification performance without the need for much training data. Next we incorporate the extra information into graph-based summarization, and demonstrate that superior summaries (up to 30% improvement in ROUGE-1) are obtained.