Online tool can detect patterns in US election news coverage
From the website:
The US presidential election dominates the global media every four years, with news articles, which are carefully analysed by commentators and campaign strategists, playing a major role in shaping voter opinion.
Academics at the University of Bristol’s Intelligent Systems Laboratory have developed an online tool, Election Watch, which analyses the content of news about the US election by the international media.
A paper about the project will be presented at the Proceedings of the 13th conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics held in Avignon, France.
Election Watch automatically monitors political discourse about the 2012 US presidential election from over 700 American and international news outlets. The information displayed is based, so far, on 91,456 articles.
The web tool allows users to explore news stories via an interactive interface and demonstrates the application of modern machine learning and language technologies. After analysing news articles about the 2012 US election the researchers have found patterns in the political narrative.
The online site is updated daily, by presenting narrative patterns as they were extracted from news. Narrative patterns include actors, actions, triplets representing political support between actors, and automatically inferred political allegiance of actors.
The site also presents the key named entities, timelines and heat maps. Network analysis allows the researchers to infer the role of each actor in the general political discourse, recognising adversaries and allied actors. Users can browse articles by political statements, rather than by keywords. For example, users can browse articles where Romney is described as criticising Obama. All the graphical briefing is automatically generated and interactive and each relation presented to the user can be used to retrieve supporting articles, from a set of hundreds of online news sources.
You really have to see this website. Quite amazing.
I would disagree with the placement of Obama to the far left in at least one of the graphics.
From where I sit he should be cheek and jowl with Romney, albeit on his left side.
I wonder if the data set is going to be released or if that is possible?
PBS should ask permission to carry this in a frame on their site.