The attack on a Norwegian island and the massive explosion in the heart of Oslo shocked the world. The devastating incidents took place on Friday July 22, and quickly climbed to the top of the news. The impact of the event as well as its share-of-voice are very high.
Topic detection and tracking is a technology that organizes a stream of constantly arriving news stories by the events that they discuss. Aino has detected the new event by using an advanced clustering algorithm that automatically creates a bundle, that is a multimedia topic aggregating information atoms from real-time multimedia streams regarding the new event. A topic is defined to be a seminal event or activity, along with all directly related events and activities.
The next picture taken from aino presents the details of the bundle by showing its summary, its term cloud and its mentions from the multimedia information sources that are followed by aino: mainstream news, blogs, twitter and broadcasts.
Major Greek TV channels interrupted normal programming with a breaking news report on the event. Aino applies automatic speech recognition in broadcast news in order to identify the mentions regarding the event. Moreover, aino applies video text recognition on overlay text and retrieves relevant video segments by searching the multimedia index. This methodology significantly improves the precision of the retrieval procedure.
Bloggers and twitters almost immediately covered the attacks.
Once we have detected the topic and we have created its corresponding topic model, our aim is to map incoming information atoms to the predefined topic, so that we can track its evolution over time. Aino monitors the stream of arriving news stories and picks out those that discuss the Norway attacks. The topic model is updated with each new information atom that is assigned to the topic. The retrieval threshold can be defined by the user: if we drag the similarity button to the right, we track only the specific topic while if we drag it to the left, similar topics are retrieved as well.
