Newsblaster: The Computer Turned Journalist

The Online Journalism Review reports that computer scientists at Columbia University are creating the Columbia Newsblaster, a computer program which gathers the news from news sites on the web including Yahoo, ABCNews, CNN, Reuters, Los Angeles Times, CBS News, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Virtual New York, Washington Post, Wired, and USA Today. Using artificial intelligence with natural language processing, it creates a summary of all related articles, providing links to the sources underneath much like a works cited list. Hopefully no one will make a student version of this for writing research papers.