Understanding news story chains using information retrieval and network clustering techniques

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Nicholls, Tom, Bright, Jonathan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2018
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author Nicholls, Tom
Bright, Jonathan
author_facet Nicholls, Tom
Bright, Jonathan
contents Content analysis of news stories (whether manual or automatic) is a cornerstone of the communication studies field. However, much research is conducted at the level of individual news articles, despite the fact that news events (especially significant ones) are frequently presented as "stories" by news outlets: chains of connected articles covering the same event from different angles. These stories are theoretically highly important in terms of increasing public recall of news items and enhancing the agenda-setting power of the press. Yet thus far, the field has lacked an efficient method for detecting groups of articles which form stories in a way that enables their analysis. In this work, we present a novel, automated method for identifying linked news stories from within a corpus of articles. This method makes use of techniques drawn from the field of information retrieval to identify textual closeness of pairs of articles, and then clustering techniques taken from the field of network analysis to group these articles into stories. We demonstrate the application of the method to a corpus of 61,864 articles, and show how it can efficiently identify valid story clusters within the corpus. We use the results to make observations about the prevalence and dynamics of stories within the UK news media, showing that more than 50% of news production takes place within stories.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_1801_07988
institution arXiv
publishDate 2018
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Understanding news story chains using information retrieval and network clustering techniques
Nicholls, Tom
Bright, Jonathan
Social and Information Networks
Information Retrieval
Content analysis of news stories (whether manual or automatic) is a cornerstone of the communication studies field. However, much research is conducted at the level of individual news articles, despite the fact that news events (especially significant ones) are frequently presented as "stories" by news outlets: chains of connected articles covering the same event from different angles. These stories are theoretically highly important in terms of increasing public recall of news items and enhancing the agenda-setting power of the press. Yet thus far, the field has lacked an efficient method for detecting groups of articles which form stories in a way that enables their analysis. In this work, we present a novel, automated method for identifying linked news stories from within a corpus of articles. This method makes use of techniques drawn from the field of information retrieval to identify textual closeness of pairs of articles, and then clustering techniques taken from the field of network analysis to group these articles into stories. We demonstrate the application of the method to a corpus of 61,864 articles, and show how it can efficiently identify valid story clusters within the corpus. We use the results to make observations about the prevalence and dynamics of stories within the UK news media, showing that more than 50% of news production takes place within stories.
title Understanding news story chains using information retrieval and network clustering techniques
topic Social and Information Networks
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.07988