SmartNews: Bringing Order into Comments Chaos

Various news sites exist today where internet audience can read the most recent news and see what other people think about. Most sites do not organize comments well and do not filter irrelevant content. Due to this limitation, readers who are interested to know other people’s opinion regarding any specific topic, have to manually follow relevant comments, reading and filtering a lot of irrelevant text. In this work, we introduce a new approach for retrieving and ranking the relevant comments for a given paragraph of news article and vice versa. We use Topic-Sensitive PageRank for ranking comments/paragraphs relevant for a user-specified paragraph/comment. The browser extension implementing our approach (called SmartNews) for Yahoo! News is publicly available.