Intelligent Agent for Publication and Subscription Pattern Analysis of News Websites

The rapid growth of Internet has revolutionized online news reporting. Many users tend to use online news websites to obtain news information. When considering Sri Lanka, there are numerous news websites, which are subscribed on a daily basis. With the rise in this number of news websites, the Sri Lankan authorities of media face the issue of lacking a proper methodology or a tool which is capable of tracking and regulating publications made by different disseminators of news. This paper proposes a News Agent toolbox which periodically extracts news articles and associated comments with the aid of a concept called Mapping Rules; to classify them into Personalized Categories defined in terms of keywords based Category Profiles. The proposed tool also analyzes comments made by the readers with the aid of simple statistical techniques to discover the most popular news articles and fluctuations in popularity of news stories.