StoryUpgrade: Finding Stories in Internet Weblogs

Abstract

The phenomenal rise of Internet weblogging has created new opportunities for people to tell personal stories of their life experience, and the potential to share these stories with those who can most benefit from reading them. One barrier to this new mode of storytelling is the lack of accessibility; existing Internet search tools are not tailored to the unique characteristics of this textual genre. In this paper we describe our efforts to develop a search engine specifically for the stories that appear in Internet weblogs, called StoryUpgrade. This application utilizes statistical text classification technologies to separate story content from other text in weblog entries, and facilitates searches for stories that are related to particular activities of interest.