A linguistically-driven methodology for detecting impending and unfolding emergencies from social media messages

Natural disasters have demonstrated the crucial role of social media before, during and after emergencies (Haddow & Haddow 2013). Within our EU project Sland \ub4 ail, we aim to ethically improve \ub4 the use of social media in enhancing the response of disaster-related agen-cies. To this end, we have collected corpora of social and formal media to study newsroom communication of emergency management organisations in English and Italian. Currently, emergency management agencies in English-speaking countries use social media in different measure and different degrees, whereas Italian National Protezione Civile only uses Twitter at the moment. Our method is developed with a view to identifying communicative strategies and detecting sentiment in order to distinguish warnings from actual disasters and major from minor disasters. Our linguistic analysis uses humans to classify alert/warning messages or emer-gency response and mitigation ones based on the terminology used and the sentiment expressed. Results of linguistic analysis are then used to train an application by tagging messages and detecting disaster- and/or emergency-related terminology and emotive language to simulate human rating and forward information to an emergency management system

Automatically Detecting the Resonance of Terrorist Movement Frames on the Web

The ever-increasing use of the internet by terrorist groups as a platform for the dissemination of radical, violent ideologies is well documented. The internet has, in this way, become a breeding ground for potential lone-wolf terrorists; that is, individuals who commit acts of terror inspired by the ideological rhetoric emitted by terrorist organizations. These individuals are characterized by their lack of formal affiliation with terror organizations, making them difficult to intercept with traditional intelligence techniques. The radicalization of individuals on the internet poses a considerable threat to law enforcement and national security officials. This new medium of radicalization, however, also presents new opportunities for the interdiction of lone wolf terrorism. This dissertation is an account of the development and evaluation of an information technology (IT) framework for detecting potentially radicalized individuals on social media sites and Web fora. Unifying Collective Action Framing Theory (CAFT) and a radicalization model of lone wolf terrorism, this dissertation analyzes a corpus of propaganda documents produced by several, radically different, terror organizations. This analysis provides the building blocks to define a knowledge model of terrorist ideological framing that is implemented as a Semantic Web Ontology. Using several techniques for ontology guided information extraction, the resultant ontology can be accurately processed from textual data sources. This dissertation subsequently defines several techniques that leverage the populated ontological representation for automatically identifying individuals who are potentially radicalized to one or more terrorist ideologies based on their postings on social media and other Web fora. The dissertation also discusses how the ontology can be queried using intuitive structured query languages to infer triggering events in the news. The prototype system is evaluated in the context of classification and is shown to provide state of the art results. The main outputs of this research are (1) an ontological model of terrorist ideologies (2) an information extraction framework capable of identifying and extracting terrorist ideologies from text, (3) a classification methodology for classifying Web content as resonating the ideology of one or more terrorist groups and (4) a methodology for rapidly identifying news content of relevance to one or more terrorist groups

Analysis and Design of Computational News Angles

A key skill for a journalist is the ability to assess the newsworthiness of an event or situation. To this purpose journalists often rely on news angles, conceptual criteria that are used both i) to assess whether something is newsworthy and also ii) to shape the structure of the resulting news item. As journalism becomes increasingly computer-supported, and more and more sources of potentially newsworthy data become available in real time, it makes sense to try and equip journalistic software tools with operational versions of news angles, so that, when searching this vast data space, these tools can both identify effectively the events most relevant to the target audience, and also link them to appropriate news angles. In this paper we analyse the notion of news angle and, in particular, we i) introduce a formal framework and data schema for representing news angles and related concepts and ii) carry out a preliminary analysis and characterization of a number of commonly used news angles, both in terms of our formal model and also in terms of the computational reasoning capabilities that are needed to apply them effectively to real-world scenarios. This study provides a stepping stone towards our ultimate goal of realizing a solution capable of exploiting a library of news angles to identify potentially newsworthy events in a large journalistic data space

Automatic Extraction and Assessment of Entities from the Web

The search for information about entities, such as people or movies, plays an increasingly important role on the Web. This information is still scattered across many Web pages, making it more time consuming for a user to find all relevant information about an entity. This thesis describes techniques to extract entities and information about these entities from the Web, such as facts, opinions, questions and answers, interactive multimedia objects, and events. The findings of this thesis are that it is possible to create a large knowledge base automatically using a manually-crafted ontology. The precision of the extracted information was found to be between 75–90 % (facts and entities respectively) after using assessment algorithms. The algorithms from this thesis can be used to create such a knowledge base, which can be used in various research fields, such as question answering, named entity recognition, and information retrieval

Breaking the Criminogenic Code: A Frame Analysis of Neo-Nazi and Violent Jihadi Propaganda

This dissertation focuses on neo-Nazi and violent jihadi propaganda and its role in defining social boundaries. Frame analysis was used to gain a deeper understanding of how neo-Nazis and violent jihadis construct propaganda to neutralize objections and promote drift. Specifically, diagnostic and prognostic frames were analyzed for 10 effective propagandists and two ineffective propagandists in a comparative framework. This research uses a social psychological perspective, paying particular attention to the emotion of shame and advances the violence as communication model into terrorism as criminogenic propaganda. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used to analyze how neo-Nazi and violent jihadi propagandists incorporate diagnostic and prognostic frames as techniques of neutralization. Specifically, I analyzed: (1) frame typologies, (2) relationships between frames, (3) location of frames, and (4) frame prevalence. The results provide a better understanding of the link between terrorist propaganda and radicalization and can be used to inform future research and policy decisions

Identifying subjective statements in news titles using a personal sense annotation framework

This is the accepted version of the following article: Panicheva, P.; Cardiff, J.; Rosso, P. (2013). Identifying subjective statements in news titles using a personal sense annotation framework. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 64(7):1411-1422 , which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.22841.[EN] Subjective language contains information about private states. The goal of subjective language identification is to determine that a private state is expressed, without considering its polarity or specific emotion. A component of word meaning, "Personal Sense," has clear potential in the field of subjective language identification, as it reflects a meaning of words in terms of unique personal experience and carries personal characteristics. In this paper we investigate how Personal Sense can be harnessed for the purpose of identifying subjectivity in news titles. In the process, we develop a new Personal Sense annotation framework for annotating and classifying subjectivity, polarity, and emotion. The Personal Sense framework yields high performance in a fine-grained subsentence subjectivity classification. Our experiments demonstrate lexico-syntactic features to be useful for the identification of subjectivity indicators and the targets that receive the subjective Personal Sense.The work of Paolo Rosso was done within the EC WIQEI IRSES project (grant no. 269180) FP 7 Marie Curie People Framework, the MICINN Text-Enterprise 2.0 project (TIN2009-13391-C04-03) Plan I+D+I, and the VLC/CAMPUS Microcluster on Multimodal Interaction in Intelligent Systems. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.Panicheva, P.; Cardiff, J.; Rosso, P. (2013). Identifying subjective statements in news titles using a personal sense annotation framework. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 64(7):1411-1422. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.22841S1411142264

Extractivisms, Existences, and Extinctions : Monoculture Plantations and Amazon Deforestation

Peer reviewe