ElectionWatch: Detecting Patterns in News Coverage of US Elections

We present a web tool that allows users to explore news stories concerning the 2012 US Presidential Elections via an interactive interface. The tool is based on concepts of “narrative analysis”, where the key actors of a narration are identified, along with their relations, in what are sometimes called “semantic triplets” (one example of a triplet of this kind is “Romney Criticised Obama”). The network of actors and their relations can be mined for insights about the structure of the narration, including the identification of the key players, of the network of political support of each of them, a representation of the similarity of their political positions, and other information concerning their role in the media narration of events. The interactive interface allows the users to retrieve news report supporting the relations of interest.