Detecting Controversies in Online News Media

This paper sets out to detect controversial news reports using online discussions as a source of information. We define controversy as a public discussion that divides society and demonstrate that a content and stylometric analysis of these debates yields useful signals for extracting disputed news items. Moreover, we argue that a debate-based approach could produce more generic models, since the discussion architectures we exploit to measure controversy occur on many different platforms

Re-constructing “China” in a Transnational Context

This study critically examines two Chinese newspapers’ representation of China as a “nation” and “culture.” Prior studies have deeply and broadly explored various ways through which China, Chinese culture, and nationalism were constructed in popular media forums. What has been missing is a continued exploration of these constructions offered by the Chinese media sources that are published outside the dominant Chinese cultural, national, and political contexts. Using World Journal and Sing Tao Daily, two major Chinese immigrant newspapers, as the texts for analysis, this study produces important findings that demonstrate how China is constructed as a contested, multi-layered, powerful, and divided culture and nation. Based on the study’s result, future inquiries can continue to analyze the representation of China across multiple media and linguistic platforms

Conflict – Crisis Hierarchy in English News Discourse: Cognitive Rhetorical Perspective

The paper argues that in English on-line news the meanings of the conflict and crisis terms serve as reference points for the construction of a confrontation hierarchy. It is based on the interaction of the relations of force, serving as primes for meaning formation, with three levels of discourse prominence meant to attract, focus and keep the addressee’s attention in headings, headlines and throughout the text respectively. It is found that news stories arrange the units of conflict – crisis hierarchy according to three patterns: zoom-in, offering a detailed textual representation of confrontation with support of the argumentation sections of evidence, explanation or commentary; zoom-out, generalizing on the forces, underlying confrontation construction; multiperspectivation, aimed at a multifaceted representation of conflict – crisis hierarchy

Trascendiendo textos y contextos: metodología para investigar polémicas mediáticas

Basándose en la revisión e interpretación de presupuestos teórico-metodológicos relativos a la comunicación social, el periodismo, la polémica, el análisis de contenido en los MCM y del discurso ideológico, este artículo fundamenta una metodología para investigar sobre polémicas mediáticas en publicaciones impresas, la cual es aplicable a controversias que circulan en medios digitales, adecuando a las peculiaridades de estos la variable correspondiente a la presentación de los materiales implicados en la disputa. Dicha propuesta permite registrar el contexto de la controversia sometida a escrutinio, su relevancia, temas; las características, ideologías y proceder de los actores; la estructuración del espacio discursivo que el medio le concede (ubicación, géneros, paratextos); la profundidad del debate, su lenguaje, tono y recursos; su tipología; las funciones que cumple; el alcance y repercusión dentro del Sistema de Comunicación y el Social. Asimismo, posibilita verificar la recepción que ha tenido en la esfera pública la polémica en cuestión

Controversy Analysis and Detection

Seeking information on a controversial topic is often a complex task. Alerting users about controversial search results can encourage critical literacy, promote healthy civic discourse and counteract the filter bubble effect, and therefore would be a useful feature in a search engine or browser extension. Additionally, presenting information to the user about the different stances or sides of the debate can help her navigate the landscape of search results beyond a simple list of 10 links . This thesis has made strides in the emerging niche of controversy detection and analysis. The body of work in this thesis revolves around two themes: computational models of controversy, and controversies occurring in neighborhoods of topics. Our broad contributions are: (1) Presenting a theoretical framework for modeling controversy as contention among populations; (2) Constructing the first automated approach to detecting controversy on the web, using a KNN classifier that maps from the web to similar Wikipedia articles; and (3) Proposing a novel controversy detection in Wikipedia by employing a stacked model using a combination of link structure and similarity. We conclude this work by discussing the challenging technical, societal and ethical implications of this emerging research area and proposing avenues for future work