Social media such as microblogs have become so pervasive such that it is now possible to use them as sensors for real-world events and memes. While much recent research has focused on developing automatic methods for filtering and summarizing these data streams, we explore a different trend called social curation. In contrast to automatic methods, social curation is characterized as a human-in-the-loop and sometimes crowd-sourced mechanism for exploiting social media as sensors. Although social curation web services like Togetter, Naver Matome and Storify are gaining popularity, little academic research has studied the phenomenon. In this paper, our goal is to investigate the phenomenon and potential of this new field of social curation. First, we perform an in-depth analysis of a large corpus of curated microblog data. We seek to understand why and how people participate in this laborious curation process. We then explore new ways in which information retrieval and machine learning technologies can be used to assist curators. In particular, we propose a novel method based on a learning-to-rank framework that increases the curator's productivity and breadth of perspective by suggesting which novel microblogs should be added to the curated content.

In this paper, we propose a machine learning-based method of multi-document summarization integrating sentence extraction with bunsetsu elimination. We employ Support Vector Machines for both of the modules used. To evaluate the effect of bunsetsu elimination, we participated in the multi-document summarization task at TSC-2 by the following two approaches: (1) sentence extraction only, and (2) sentence extraction + bunsetsu elimination. The results of subjective evaluation at TSC-2 show that both approaches are superior to the Lead-based method from the viewpoint of information coverage. In addition, we made extracts from given abstracts to quantitatively examine the effectiveness of bunsetsu elimination. The experimental results showed that our bunsetsu elimination makes summaries more informative. Moreover, we found that extraction based on SVMs trained by short extracts are better than the Lead-based method, but that SVMs trained by long extracts are not.