In light of recent research that has begun to examine the link between textual “big data” and social phenomena such as stock price increases, this chapter takes a novel approach to treating news as big data by proposing the intelligent investment decision-making support model based on opinion mining. In an initial prototype experiment, the researchers first built a stock domain-specific sentime...

A review of research suggests that the desire for opinion reinforcement may play a more important role in shaping individuals’ exposure to online political information than an aversion to opinion challenge. The article tests this idea using data collected via a webadministered behavior-tracking study with subjects recruited from the readership of 2 partisan online news sites (N = 727). The resu...

The large-scale collection and exploitation of personal information to drive targeted online advertisements has raised privacy concerns. As a step towards understanding these concerns, we study the relationship between how much information is collected and how valuable it is for advertising. We use HTTP traces consisting of millions of users to aid our study and also present the first comparati...

At present, there are many communities of blogs that are connected to each other in a formal or informal manner, through blogroll links, casual references from posts or via sites set up as aggregators for communities of interest. However, there is much information in such communities that could be formalised for use in searching, browsing and viewing of blog posts either locally or using third-...

Our survey study of 147 Finns shows that online news is becoming the most important news source today: Online newspapers have bypassed paper newspapers and also TV and radio in importance, especially among young adults. Although most respondents routinely visited their preferred news sites directly, recommendations from their social network also played an important role in helping them find sal...

News and blogs are two types of media that generate and offer informational resources. News is any information whose revelation is anticipated to have an intellectual or actionable impact on the recipient. The dominant type of news in text analysis is that pertaining to current events. Originally referring to print-based news from press agencies or end-user news providers (like individual newsp...

Wars and conflicts have constituted major events throughout history. Despite their importance, the general public typically learns about such events only indirectly, through the lens of news media, which necessarily select and distort events before relaying them to readers. Quantifying these processes is important, as they are fundamental to how we see the world, but the task is difficult, as i...

This article proposes Hermes, a Semantic Web-based framework for building personalized news services. It makes use of ontologies for knowledge representation, natural language processing techniques for semantic text analysis, and semantic query languages for specifying wanted information. Hermes is supported by an implementation of the framework, the Hermes News Portal, a tool which allows user...

In this paper we present the CoNews framework, a hybrid approach to publish online news stories, consisting of the combination of news entries extracted from authoritative sources retrieved from news search engines with blog articles and user-submitted less-authoritative stories. Some of the goals of this research include experimenting with new forms of mass communication and editorial control ...

The way in which people acquire information on events and form their own opinion on them has changed dramatically with the advent of social media. For many readers, the news gathered from online sources becomes an opportunity to share points of view and information within the micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter, mainly aimed at satisfying their communication needs. Furthermore, the need to...