From blogs to news: identifying hot topics in the blogosphere

Abstract: We describe the participation of the University of Amsterdam’s ILPS group in the blog track at TREC 2009. We focus on the top sto-ries identification task, and take an approach that does not require the headlines of top stories to be known beforehand. We explore the feasibility of a so-called blogs to news approach: given a date and a set of blog posts, identify the main topics for that date. This approach is more general than just find-ing top stories, but it can still be applied to the task of headline ranking. Results show that this general approach, applied to the task at hand, is among the top performing approaches in this year’s TREC.