Automatic animation of discussions in USENET Jun Yabe Shin Takahashi Estuya Shibayama Department of Mathematical and Computing Sciences Tokyo Institute of Technology 2-12-10okayama Meguro-ku Tokyo,152-8552, JAPAN yabe @ sslab.sony.co.jp, shin @ is.titech.ac.jp, etsuya @ is.titech.ac.jp ABSTRACT threads, so that the user could easily find articles of inter- This paper proposes a technique for generating more com- est among massive numbers of articles of various quality. prehensible animations from discussions, which are often Galaxy of News[12] showed USENET articles clustered by hard to follow, in USENET. This technique consists of two keywords extracted from the articles and supported users steps. In the first step, our prototype system generates a in searching for articles of particular interest. There are scenario from articles in a news thread using the quote re- also systems that visualize the transition of topics in the lationship. In the second step, it generates an animation discussions. These systems can show subtle differences in based on the scenario, casting 3D avatars as the authors of topics between the articles in a thread. HISHO[14] shows the articles. We also implemented a prototype system based the transition of topics on a reference tree, using the simi- on this technique and made several animations from articles larities between articles in a news thread. posted to USENET. However, these systems do not help users to read each indi- vidual article. The only way to understand a discussion in USENET is to read each article, but this is difficult. One Keywords reason for this is the particular form of netnews articles, Automatic Animation, USENET, using 3D Avatar which is different from the form of general documents such as a novel or a report. Another reason is that a news thread 1. INTRODUCTION consists of articles written by multiple authors who are not Asynchronous discussion systems such as USENET, mailing consistent. Therefore, the following problems still remain. lists, and electronic meeting rooms on BBS and the WWW have been widely accepted in the Internet community. These (1) The authors use quotes in order to clarify which sen- asynchronous discussion systems have an advantage of high- tence their discussion follows. The "References:" field quality information over synchronous text communication recorded in the headers of articles is also used to sug- systems such as chat systems. The reason is that users can gest context, although quotes can suggest more con- take enough time to write high-quality articles. These ar- crete relations. However, it is a nuisance to read copies ticles have been archived in various s!tes, so that we can of sentences repeatedly. Moreover, multiple quotes search and read past articles. tend to let one article include many different topics, When users read these articles, they usually use news/mail and impose a burden on the readers. readers such as GNUS or Microsoft Outlook. These tradi- tional news/mail readers usually have two window panes. (2) It is difficult to remember the authors and their state- One pane shows the structure of the whole thread, and it ments because articles do not have enough character- is so called "summary pane". The other pane displays one istic information such as face, voice, or shape. selected article. Many researchers have pointed out the problems of this style Figure 1 shows a typical example of the first problem. Read- of reading and have proposed alternative layouts. Most ers usually read each article in a thread in a depth-first man- of this past work consisted of improvements to the sum- ner on the reference tree. In this example, the user may mary window, and created visualizations of news groups and read articles A, B, C, D, .., E in order. B-1 may be related *The author's curret address is SUPC MW dept. Sony Cor- strongly to B-2, but D-1 may have a different topic from D-2. poration. If so, the user must read multiple.topics simultaneously. The second problem is caused by the lack of enough infor- mation to distinguish the authors for readers. Identification Permission to make digital or hand copie of all or part of this of authors is necessary to understand their intentions. Ar- work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provi- ticles contain information to identify the author such as the ded that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commer- "From:" header in each article and signatures, but they do cial advantage, and that copies bear this notice and the full cita- not have enough characteristics to remember the authors tion on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on and their statements only by reading a thread. In face-to- servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permis- sion and/or a fee. face discussion in the real world, we can easily remember AVI 2000, Palermo, Italy. each speaker and statement because we can relate his or her © 2000 ACM 1-58113-252-2/00/0005..$5.00 face, voice, or shape to his or her statements. 84 Ad~cleB Artmlec /~rtmle D Time speech 1 . Depth-firs! ~ding t I speech2 A~E I I ~"~°'~'~*"°"~= ..... I ~o,,ow I ~1 ~ °u°" t / Nestedq~ote I speech3 I obiousor explanation J 12/ Figure 1: Depth-first reading speech 4 j""'= To solve these problems, we propose a technique that gener- speech 5 I ates animations of discussions from articles in a news thread in USENET, using 3D avatars allocated for each author. This technique consists of two steps shown in Figure 2. (1) Figure 3: relation of speech The first step is the generation of the scenarios on which the animation is based. (2) The second step is generation of animation with a 3D avatar allocated to each author. a quote shows relations between parts of articles. For exam- ple, in Figure 2.2 article B refers to article A and quotes two News articles segments from article A. Article B consists of the two quoted o! a thread text segments and two other text segments commenting on Scenario the two quoted text segments. Generate of Scenario Article A Subject: about netnews I From: [email protected] ~ir.=~o. (2) Hello, I think that it's hard to read the articles in netnews. Especially, it tend to forget who state that or what he or she l ,I, state. ~~ I Animation of Di.... ion I Sometimes, I noticed that somebody writes "1 did't write so !". I am sure that he thinks the same matter too. ] Article B Figure 2: Abstract of the System Subject: Re:about netnews From: [email protected] The generation of the scenarios solves the problems caused >Hello, I think that it's hard to read the articles in netnews. Quote (A-l) >Especially, if tend to forget who state that or what he or she L by quotes because the user can understand a discussion with- >state. "-T-- B-1 out repeated reading of copies or reading different topics si- I feel the same way. Looking the signature or the from, we can know the author, but shortly forget that. multaneously. Moreover, the animation of discussion solves >Sometimes, I noticed that somebody wdtes "l did't write so !', Quote (A-2) the problem of identification of authors because 3D avatars >1 am sure that he thinks the same matter too. have much information to associate authors and their state- As one article had followed by many persons, it's hard to match each ments such as face, voice, and shape. authors and their comments. As a result, FLAME !! S-2 We have developed a prototype system based on this tech- nique, that automatically generates a script written in TVML[5; Figure 4: Relation by quote 3]. TVML is a script description language to produce a TV program using 3D avatars and a voice synthesizer, and can The relations between the text segments in Figure 2.2 are generate a TV program from a script. shown in Figure 5. There are two kinds of links that con- nect two text segments. One is a link by quote that connects 2. GENERATION OF SCENARIOS the text segment quoted by an article and the text segment This section describes a technique for generating a scenario just after the quoted text. Another link specifies that the based on the relationships between netnews articles. two text segments are originally arranged in sequence in the original article. This link is generated to maintain the rela- 2.1 Relation of text segments tionships between text segments divided by multiple quotes. In a log of chat communication or a scenario of a TV pro- Compared to relations of speeches in TV programs or chat gram, each speech is basically related to the speech imme- communication, text segment relations in netnews have the diately before it. Even when a speech is related to a speech following features. earlier than the last one, the relation between them is obvi- 1. Sentences in a scenario of a TV program and a log of ous from the contents or the scenario includes some expla- chat are already arranged in sequence. However, in or- nation of the relation (Figure 3). der to serialize them, text segments in netnews articles On the other hand, relations between the articles in a news must be ordered, and the ordering is not obvious. thread are difficult because they are expressed by quote and reference. A reference shows a relation between articles, and 2. Relations in a scenario of TV program and chat be- 85 Follow j Article B i Article D I / ~'iQUOTE(A-I)~)',I PI~I~VIOIAST]._'XT I feel I~e ~ way.