Data Analysis of the Web News Headlines based on Natural Language Processing

This paper explores the problem of media content data analysis with the focus on the phenomenon of vaccination, closely related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The presented research is an extension of the previous work, but it differs in two main areas. Firstly, the text corpus submitted to the analysis has been considerably increased. Secondly, the previous data analysis was performed on the body part of the posts, while now it is focused on the most prominent part of the news posts, their headlines. This change from body to headline analysis was provoked by significant differences in their characteristics and the fact that most people read only headlines. Described data acquisition uses an advanced content collection approach followed by the modeling process, during which a set of natural language processing algorithms were applied. To enable the comparison, the model uses the same set of algorithms in the modeling phase like in previous work. The main contributions of the work are manifested in: i) approaching the problem from a new perspective, ii) applying more efficient method of data collection, and crucially iii) enabling the comparison of analysis results for individual parts of the content, which ensured a comprehensive insight into the characteristics of news posts

Web news mining in an evolving framework

Online news has become one of the major channels for Internet users to get news. News websites are daily overwhelmed with plenty of news articles. Huge amounts of online news articles are generated and updated everyday, and the processing and analysis of this large corpus of data is an important challenge. This challenge needs to be tackled by using big data techniques which process large volume of data within limited run times. Also, since we are heading into a social-media data explosion, techniques such as text mining or social network analysis need to be seriously taken into consideration. In this work we focus on one of the most common daily activities: web news reading. News websites produce thousands of articles covering a wide spectrum of topics or categories which can be considered as a big data problem. In order to extract useful information, these news articles need to be processed by using big data techniques. In this context, we present an approach for classifying huge amounts of different news articles into various categories (topic areas) based on the text content of the articles. Since these categories are constantly updated with new articles, our approach is based on Evolving Fuzzy Systems (EFS). The EFS can update in real time the model that describes a category according to the changes in the content of the corresponding articles. The novelty of the proposed system relies in the treatment of the web news articles to be used by these systems and the implementation and adjustment of them for this task. Our proposal not only classifies news articles, but it also creates human interpretable models of the different categories. This approach has been successfully tested using real on-line news. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This work has been supported by the Spanish Government under i-Support (Intelligent Agent Based Driver Decision Support) Project (TRA2011-29454-C03-03)

A series of case studies to enhance the social utility of RSS

RSS (really simple syndication, rich site summary or RDF site summary) is a dialect of XML that provides a method of syndicating on-line content, where postings consist of frequently updated news items, blog entries and multimedia. RSS feeds, produced by organisations or individuals, are often aggregated, and delivered to users for consumption via readers. The semi-structured format of RSS also allows the delivery/exchange of machine-readable content between different platforms and systems. Articles on web pages frequently include icons that represent social media services which facilitate social data. Amongst these, RSS feeds deliver data which is typically presented in the journalistic style of headline, story and snapshot(s). Consequently, applications and academic research have employed RSS on this basis. Therefore, within the context of social media, the question arises: can the social function, i.e. utility, of RSS be enhanced by producing from it data which is actionable and effective? This thesis is based upon the hypothesis that the fluctuations in the keyword frequencies present in RSS can be mined to produce actionable and effective data, to enhance the technology's social utility. To this end, we present a series of laboratory-based case studies which demonstrate two novel and logically consistent RSS-mining paradigms. Our first paradigm allows users to define mining rules to mine data from feeds. The second paradigm employs a semi-automated classification of feeds and correlates this with sentiment. We visualise the outputs produced by the case studies for these paradigms, where they can benefit users in real-world scenarios, varying from statistics and trend analysis to mining financial and sporting data. The contributions of this thesis to web engineering and text mining are the demonstration of the proof of concept of our paradigms, through the integration of an array of open-source, third-party products into a coherent and innovative, alpha-version prototype software implemented in a Java JSP/servlet-based web application architecture

A series of case studies to enhance the social utility of RSS

RSS (really simple syndication, rich site summary or RDF site summary) is a dialect of XML that provides a method of syndicating on-line content, where postings consist of frequently updated news items, blog entries and multimedia. RSS feeds, produced by organisations or individuals, are often aggregated, and delivered to users for consumption via readers. The semi-structured format of RSS also allows the delivery/exchange of machine-readable content between different platforms and systems. Articles on web pages frequently include icons that represent social media services which facilitate social data. Amongst these, RSS feeds deliver data which is typically presented in the journalistic style of headline, story and snapshot(s). Consequently, applications and academic research have employed RSS on this basis. Therefore, within the context of social media, the question arises: can the social function, i.e. utility, of RSS be enhanced by producing from it data which is actionable and effective? This thesis is based upon the hypothesis that the fluctuations in the keyword frequencies present in RSS can be mined to produce actionable and effective data, to enhance the technology's social utility. To this end, we present a series of laboratory-based case studies which demonstrate two novel and logically consistent RSS-mining paradigms. Our first paradigm allows users to define mining rules to mine data from feeds. The second paradigm employs a semi-automated classification of feeds and correlates this with sentiment. We visualise the outputs produced by the case studies for these paradigms, where they can benefit users in real-world scenarios, varying from statistics and trend analysis to mining financial and sporting data. The contributions of this thesis to web engineering and text mining are the demonstration of the proof of concept of our paradigms, through the integration of an array of open-source, third-party products into a coherent and innovative, alpha-version prototype software implemented in a Java JSP/servlet-based web application architecture