The Columbia Newsblaster “uses natural language processing techniques to read what is written in published news reports” and writes summaries. It is able to identify which category it should place the news item in, and also gathers relevant photographs. This program is not intended to be a replacement for a reporter, but is more of a tool to manage the information glut we can find ourselves in. Trickier things it has to contend with are differences in reported facts, differing numbers of casualties, for instance, and dealing with tone. Improvements are planned. It will be interesting to see if any news summary sites take advantage of its features. (info culled from an OJR article by a not so artificially intelligent being)