Towards leveraging closed captions for news retrieval

IntoNow from Yahoo! is a second screen application that enhances the way of watching TV programs. The application uses audio from the TV set to recognize the program being watched, and provides several services for different use cases. For instance, while watching a football game on TV it can show statistics about the teams playing, or show the title of the song performed by a contestant in a talent show. The additional content provided by IntoNow is a mix of editorially curated and automatically selected one. From a research perspective, one of the most interesting and challenging use cases addressed by IntoNow is related to news programs (newscasts). When a user is watching a newscast, IntoNow detects it and starts showing online news articles from the Web. This work presents a preliminary study of this problem, i.e., to find an online news article that matches the piece of news discussed in the newscast currently airing on TV, and display it in real-time.