Our new Research Project "SPURT" (Language Models for Generating Polls and the Identification of Topics) has started

Author: Andreas Lommatzsch

Learning about user interests and opinions of readers of news portals is interesting for both readers and authors. Online surveys and polls have been shown useful to engage readers and to learn about the readers options. The challenge in defining good questions (interesting for most users) is the broad spectrum of topic (requiring matching questions) and finding an adequate question formulation.

Researching what questions attract most users and how readers of online news portals interact with online polls is the objective in a joined project "What-The-Question" between the DAI-Lab at the TU Berlin and Opinary. A special focus lies on applying language models for understanding the context and linguistic aspects of the questions. In addition, methods for the automatic creation of context-aware questions are researched.

The project is supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action within the funding program "Central Innovation Programme for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)".