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  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Ins and Outs of News: Twitter as a Real-Time News Analysis Service</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Arjumand Younus, M. Atif Qureshi</string-name>
          <email>arjumandms@kaist.ac.kr</email>
          <email>arjumandms@kaist.ac.kr, atifms@kaist.ac.kr</email>
          <email>atifms@kaist.ac.kr</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Ahmad Nauman Ghazi</string-name>
          <email>angh08@student.bth.se</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Samina Mumtaz, Muhammad Saeed</string-name>
          <email>saeed@uok.edu.pk</email>
          <email>saeed@uok.edu.pk, saminamumtaz08@gmail.com</email>
          <email>saminamumtaz08@gmail.com</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Nasir Touheed, M. Shahid Qureshi</string-name>
          <email>ntouheed@iba.edu.pk, mqureshi@iba.edu.pk</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">3</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Blekinge Tekniska Högskola</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Ronneby</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="SE">Sweden</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>Department of Computer Science</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>KAIST, Daejeon</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="KR">Korea</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff2">
          <label>2</label>
          <institution>Department of Computer Science</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Karachi</addr-line>
          ,
          <institution>University</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Karachi</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="PK">Pakistan</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff3">
          <label>3</label>
          <institution>Institute of Business Administration</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Karachi</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="PK">Pakistan</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <abstract>
        <p>Both time and user popularity play a crucial role within the domain of news search - the fundamental problem lies in integrating these two onto a single platform for news retrieval systems. In this paper we propose techniques for enhancement of these systems by identifying the news topics that are popular over a certain period of time. The notion of “popularity over time” is studied with the help of the well-known real-time microblogging service “Twitter” - our method performs linguistic analysis of the news data published daily on news sites for extraction and detection of news topics that are in high demand using Twitter. We also present a prototype of our framework which detects popular news in real-time. The results obtained suggest the need of taking into account users' interest for effective news services and strongly imply that harnessing of microblogging data for this purpose can lead to surprising outcomes.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>-</title>
      <p>
        Author Keywords
Twittersphere, online news services, news retrieval
systems, popularity over time
1 INTRODUCTION
The Social Web has introduced a major paradigm shift in
the way the World Wide Web is envisioned and this has
also had a significant effect on the users’ news consumption
patterns –users share their chosen news (simply, a news of
users’ interest or a popular news for users) through the
social media platforms and as such there is an increased
need for effective news services that take into consideration
the users’ interest in the news [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10 ref2 ref24 ref5">2, 5, 10, 24</xref>
        ]. Furthermore,
search engines are the primary means through which users
access online news [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ]. Hence in the domain of news
information retrieval there is a clear need for the use of
approaches that take into account human factors; this is also
the case for the news production and presentation process
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref24">24</xref>
        ]. “Popularity over time” is a crucial human factor
within the news retrieval and presentation domain.
Our notion of “popularity over time” with respect to news
services encompasses two concepts: user popularity in the
form of hot news topics and time which in the case of news
services relates to freshness of news. Both these aspects
play a very significant role in news information retrieval:
popularity is a notion that has long been studied by
information retrieval researchers [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">14</xref>
        ] and recent focus of
researchers in this domain is shifting towards temporal
aspects of documents [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ] – however what is being ignored
in these efforts is a need to integrate these two important
concepts which is a significant requirement for the special
case of news information retrieval systems. This paper is a
step in this direction and it proposes an approach for
incorporation of both these concepts.
      </p>
      <p>
        The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how information
from a micro-blogging site can be exploited to study the
evolution in news topics’ popularity. We specifically
demonstrate how to use Twitter to automatically identify
the hot news topics that Internet users are most concerned
about – furthermore, we do this repetitively in real-time as
and when news outlets produce more news. The paper also
includes the description of our prototypical framework for
identification and detection of popular news topics with
time in which we apply natural language processing
techniques on the news data and integrate our framework
with the Twitter Search API. At the core of the framework
is a visual interface [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref20">20</xref>
        ] for effective navigation across the
news data and Tweets’ data which in turn enables us to
assess in real-time the popularity of a particular news article
on the Social Web.
      </p>
      <p>Additionally through experimental evaluations on real-time
news data we provide empirical evidence supporting the
following claims:</p>
      <p>Twitter acts as an effective news sensor for popular
news topics and items.</p>
      <p>Twitter’s social graph can give important insights
into the news that are really meaningful to the
readers.</p>
      <p>Twitter acts as a crucial information gathering point
in the face of events that make breaking news.</p>
      <p>These findings suggest rich ways in which
nextgeneration news services can utilize users’ interest in the
news to improve the online news experience.</p>
      <p>The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2
discusses related work in this dimension. Section 3 presents
a discussion of how Twitter is being used as an effective
real-time news delivery service; it also includes results of a
user survey we conducted to analyze users’ news sharing
patterns on Twitter along with a brief summary of existing
news services and their limitations. Section 4 describes our
methodology in detail along with an explanation of the
underlying techniques. Section 5 presents the experimental
results. Finally Section 6 concludes the paper with
directions for future research.
2 RELATED WORK
There have been extensive studies and analysis on various
user-generated content such as blogs, social networks and
micro-blogging sites. This work has been carried out in
various dimensions. In this section we provide a brief
overview of works that are similar to ours along with a
discussion of how our contribution differs from existing
work.</p>
      <p>
        Works on analysis of blogs pursue along the same lines as
we do in this paper by analyzing the link between blogs and
news articles thereby extracting and monitoring news trends
from the blogosphere [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref23 ref4 ref6">4, 6, 23</xref>
        ]. However with the
emergence of social media and in particular micro-blogging
platforms such as Twitter there has been an increasing trend
of news sharing and searching [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">21</xref>
        ] on these media with
blogs now serving as a point where users publish their
reactions to the news and social networking sites have
replaced their role as a news sharing medium.
      </p>
      <p>
        Due to this recent development in the Internet landscape
within the past three years there has been an increasing
amount of research on Twitter. Java et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
        ] performed a
study on the topological and geographical characteristics of
Twitter – their findings reveal that people on Twitter use it
as a communication service and connect with people of
similar interests. Hughes et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ] examine usage of Twitter
in the face of crisis situations and their findings imply that
under emergency events Twitter assumes the role of a
significant information broadcasting medium. Sakaki et al.
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ] also perform a similar study but their work differs in
that they use Twitter as a social sensor for emergency
events such as earthquakes. Shamma et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
        ] analyze
tweets in the face of live media events and conclude that
tweets in the context of any particular media event give
significant insights into the semantic structure and content
of the event.
      </p>
      <p>
        There is not much work on analysis of Twitter with respect
to news data. The only work up to the best of our
knowledge is by Sankaranarayanan et al.[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">18</xref>
        ] –
TwitterStand is basically a news processing system built on
top of Twitter; it captures tweets corresponding to late
breaking news and produces a distributed news wire service
from these tweets. Our work differs from TwitterStand in
that we use Twitter as an indicator for assessing news
popularity; moreover our service combines news’ data and
tweets’ data on a single platform. This is explained in
further detail in Section 4.
3 OVERVIEW OF EXISTING NEWS SERVICES
In this section we provide an overview of the existing ways
of news delivery – at the same time we discuss the role of
Twitter as a real-time news service and we also look at
questionnaire data of an online user survey we conducted as
part of a preliminary study on Twitterers’ perception of
Twitter as a news service.
3.1 Traditional News Services
The oldest class of services that fall under the umbrella of
traditional services are online versions of newspapers and
television news with the average monthly reach of web
newspapers among Internet households increasing from
27.4% in 2004 to 40.9% in 2008 [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
        ], furthermore many
television channels now make news clips available online.
Another traditional news service constitutes search
companies – according to the most recent Pew Research
biennial news consumption survey [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ] conducted in 2008,
Yahoo (28%) and MSN (19%) are the most frequented
websites among Web news users. Search engines also
aggregate news from many sources at the same time
categorizing them into news categories of World, Business,
Sports etc. – these engines also present news clusters across
multiple sources. Then there are also the services of
email/mobile news alerts and RSS feeds that allow users to
get news on demand.
      </p>
      <p>
        An inherent limitation in all the above-mentioned news
sources is that there is little or no consideration for the
notion of “news popularity over time” – the traditional
services do not take into account the local or user
preferential buzz factor for the various news items/topics
which is a very significant requirement in today’s rich
media.
3.2 Exploratory News Services
Recently researchers in information retrieval domain are
shifting towards exploratory search paradigms for news
services which allow users to explore and discover how
entities such as people and locations associated with a news
query change over time. Some examples include Yahoo’s
Time Explorer example [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
        ] and Google News Timeline
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ]; this search service incorporates a time-based clustering
algorithm which also peers into the future based on
predictions in news articles about the future events. The
search results associated with a news query are arranged on
a timeline and it allows users to interact with time and
entities in a powerful way.
      </p>
      <p>
        Although such an exploratory news search engine presents
news in a very intuitive format, we believe it has the same
problems as those of traditional news services because there
is still a strong need to integrate the concept of popularity
with time. Systems like Time Explorer are more focused on
temporal aspects of news items which will eventually lead
to the same problem as in traditional news services.
Furthermore these systems are still in a phase of infancy
and their use is not widespread till now. We advocate that
such systems will be highly beneficial and effective if they
incorporate both user popularity and temporal aspects of
news documents.
3.3 Twitter as a Real-Time News Service
Twitter has emerged as a popular micro-blogging service –
it is structured in such a manner that in addition to being a
micro-blogging service it is also considered to be a social
network [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11</xref>
        ]. Twitter users follow others or are followed –
this relationship requires no reciprocation unlike other
online social networking sites such as Facebook or
MySpace. Being a follower implies that a user receives all
the messages called tweets (where each tweet contains a
maximum of 140 characters) from those the user follows.
Other special features of Twitter include the ability to
converse with other members of the Twittersphere using the
@ symbol; RT stands for a retweet which refers to the
practice of sharing the same content as that shared by
another Twitterer – this is also another mode of replying on
Twitter. Another special feature of tweets is that they
sometimes contain the hash symbol “#” referred to as
hashtags. By including a hashtag in a tweet, the user
originating the tweet is suggesting that the word denoted by
the hashtag makes for a good candidate as a search key for
the tweet.
      </p>
      <p>
        Twitter has become a very attractive news on-the-fly
medium; in fact many a times using Twitter one gets
information on newsworthy events even before the news
organizations do [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17 ref18">17, 18</xref>
        ]. In fact recent research has
demonstrated the use of Twitter as an effective
informationfinding medium especially with respect to temporally
relevant information [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">21</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        We conducted an online survey as a preliminary study on
how users of Twitter perceive the role of Twitter as a news
medium in which 51 active Twitter users participated and
this helped us in laying the groundwork for the subsequent
analysis. The questionnaire was designed on a
funnelshaped pattern to generate the flow of information from
general to specific. The mode of the questionnaire was kept
in both dimensions i.e., open-ended and close-ended to
maintain the criteria of required information gathering.
Most respondents (84%) reported reading tweets one or
more times per day. Forty seven (92%) of the respondents
agreed that they used Twitter to update themselves about
current issues and news and forty two (82%) respondents
indicated a preference to share happenings around them on
Twitter. Another important indicator used in this
questionnaire was the marking on a scale of 1-5 (1
indicating lowest preference and 5 indicating highest) for
the role of various sites as information-finding places: we
included traditional media i.e., TV channels, newspapers,
online news sites and search engines and the new media
i.e., Twitter. The results of this marking yield significant
insights into role of Twitter as a real-time news service and
this is what motivates us for use of this service in studying
news popularity over time: 29 (57%) of the respondents
placed Twitter’s role on a higher or equal scale to that of
search engines like Google and other news sites; seventeen
respondents (33%) placed Twitter lower than other
traditional media but the surprising aspect is that the
difference in marking levels was only by a factor of 1 i.e.,
these users marked traditional media on level 5 and Twitter
on level 4. This leads to a very significant observation that
the role of Twitter as a real-time news service is increasing
very rapidly. This serves as the basic motivation behind our
approach of utilizing Twitter for a study of news evolution
and assessment of user popularity regarding the various
news items.
4 STUDYING NEWS EVOLUTION WITH TWITTER
In this section we provide a detailed description of our
proposed framework for real-time detection of popular
news topics. In Section 4.1 we begin with a discussion of
the dimensions along which news retrieval systems align
the news data and we mention the dimensions of our focus
for the proposed framework. Section 4.2 describes the
methodology in detail whereas Section 4.3 focuses on the
user interface aspects of our prototype. Finally in Section
4.4 we discuss our ranking approach for determining the
popular news topics from tweets containing news data; the
ranking function is formulated on the basis of Twitter’s
social graph.
4.1 Dimensions for a News Retrieval System
A news retrieval system has to take into consideration news
data along three dimensions as Figure 1 shows.
Time has long been an integral part of search engine
ranking with most major search engines giving a ranking
boost for recently published documents particularly in the
news domain [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
        ]. Furthermore, news ranking sites use the
sharing of news items across social networks for assessing
the popularity – algorithms like PageRank [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">14</xref>
        ] are also
used for popularity measurement of different news sites.
Moreover as we mentioned in Section 3.1 news search
engines also present news stories as clusters across multiple
sources [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref24">24</xref>
        ]. However, as we mentioned in Section 1 the
fundamental problem lies in not integrating these three
dimensions onto a single platform for news retrieval
systems. In this paper we consider two of these dimensions
simultaneously: user popularity and time.
4.2 Proposed Methodology for Assessing News
Popularity
In this section we describe our proposed system in detail.
Figure 2 shows the architecture of our system.
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>The system is composed of three modules:</title>
      <p>
        News Module: as shown in the figure this module
performs the daily crawl of news articles; the crawler
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
        ] basically follows a refresh policy that is each
day’s newly published news articles are added to the
archive. Currently the system provides a visual
interface for displaying news articles of past four days
only (as a prototype, believing that hot news items are
generally effective over a period of maximum four
days). Each news article is parsed into summary, title
and news text. The entity extractor in the news module
takes as input the parsed news data – it processes the
news summary (provided by the news provider) part to
extract the named entities of each news article using a
named entity recognition approach [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref22">22</xref>
        ]. These named
entities are then matched across the common entity
corpus on disk – this corpus is created from parsed
news data gathered from January to August, 2010 and
the entities with high document frequencies during this
interval are part of the common entity corpus;
additional entities within this common entity corpus
include those entities that are very common in news
documents such as names of countries, cities, famous
personalities, government officials etc. The entity
extractor then sends entities tagged with information of
which is a common one and which is not is sent to the
query composer module which uses Boolean query
predicates for the search task: those entities that are
common are used with AND and those not common are
used with OR, if all the entities for a particular news
article are common entities then the news title is used
for composition of the query.
      </p>
      <p>Twitter Module: This module is responsible for the
fetching of the tweets relevant to the news articles. The
query composer in the news module sends a composed
query to the Twitter Search API: a query corresponding
to each news article is sent. The API returns tweets that
correspond to each news item; each returned tweet has
associated metadata such as timestamp, screen name of
user who tweeted it, whether it was in reply to someone
etc. After this essential step in this module comes the
task of ranking all the news articles – we use tweets
extracted per news article for this task i.e., for each
tweet relevant to a news article we extract the friends
and followers of the user who tweeted it and apply our
ranking function to rank each news article with respect
to its popularity on Twitter. We explain this ranking
function in further detail in Section 4.4.</p>
      <p>UI Module: this module comprises the user interface
part of our system. It takes an input from both the
News module and the Twitter module. The News
module sends it an unranked list of news articles for
each of the four days whereas the Twitter module sends
it a ranked list of news articles for each of the four
days. This module is further explained in Section 4.3.
Table 1 gives an algorithmic overview of our approach. The
items marked in italics hold special meaning with respect to
the proposed system.</p>
      <p>Crawl daily news data and send the unranked news articles list to
the UI module of the system.</p>
      <p>Extract news title, news summary and news text for each news
article per day.</p>
      <p>From the news summary extract named entities per news article
through a named entity recognition approach.</p>
      <p>Match each named entity across entities in the common entity
corpus and tag each named entity per news article as common or
uncommon.</p>
      <p>Use Boolean query model to compose the query per news article:
a. Use AND predicate with each common entity and OR
predicate with each uncommon entity. If all entities for
a particular news article are common use news title for
the query construction.</p>
      <p>For all articles per day:
a. Send a request to Twitter Search API and extract result
tweets per news article per day
b. For each t in result tweet:
i. Use t’s metadata to find following and
follower statistics for each unique Twitterer
who has tweeted about the news article
ii. Calculate rank of each article using the
ranking function (explained in detail in</p>
      <p>Section 4.4)
Send the ranked news articles list to the UI module of the system
4.3 User Interface
The focus of our prototype system is to detect the
popularity of a news topic/article over time and hence at the
core of the user interface is a timeline. Figure 3 displays the
timeline for 29th October, 2010.</p>
      <p>As mentioned in Section 4.2 the system shows the timelined
news assessment over a period of four days. The data of the
news articles taken from the original news source is shown
side by side with the popularity ranks calculated using our
Twitter module. This system simultaneously addresses the
temporal and popularity aspects within the news domain.
4.4 Ranking Approach
In this section we explain our ranking methodology for the
ranking module within the Twitter module of our system –
one easy approach could be to count the number of tweets
corresponding to each news article that are retrieved by the
Twitter Search API. We argue however that taking into
account social network features of Twitter is a more
effective means of ranking the news articles.</p>
      <p>
        As explained in Section 3.3 there is a follower paradigm in
Twitter – if user a choses to follow user b then user a is a
follower if we look at it from the viewpoint of user b
whereas friend if we look at it from the viewpoint of user a
– this friend is to followers relationship is what we make
use of in our ranking methodology. With the growing
popularity of Twitter as a news media as we explained in
detail in Section 3.3, many news and media outlets have
migrated to Twitter with these channels maintaining their
channels’ Twitter account for news dissemination and
propagation. One potential drawback of our proposed
system explained in Section 4.2 is that it will not
distinguish the tweets disseminated on news articles by
these news outlets – hence we devise a mechanism to do
this using the Twitter social graph. One obvious point to
note in the social network of these news and media outlets
is that they have a large number of followers but a
negligible number of friends i.e., since they are news outlets
many people follow them on Twitter but they follow none.
Hence it makes sense to utilize the following to follower
ratio for ranking of the news articles. Despite a lot of news
providers tweeting a particular news item, common users
would also tweet it if the news is really popular among
users. Moreover, if it is broadcasted but users do not take
interest in it then such a news item cannot be a popular
news item (may be an over projected news). Equation 1
shows the formula that we use.
followings
for all Twitterers Of News followers
(1)
5 EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATIONS
This section presents the details of the experiments we
conducted over a period of 10 days from 17th October to
26th October, 2010.
5.1 Experimental Dataset
The dataset comprises of the front pages news articles from
Dawn.com [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ], a famous Pakistani news paper’s website
which publishes news in the English language. We collect
their articles on daily basis from 17th October to 26th
October – we then perform the analysis using our system.
For each day’s news data the Twitter module is run at a gap
of one day hence providing a fair comparison for all the
days. The statistics collected for each run include the
number of tweets per news article per day and the ranking
scores obtained through equation 1 in Section 4.4.
5.2 Experimental Results
Three sets of experimental results are shown as verification
for each claim made in Section 1.
      </p>
      <p>
        The first set of experimental results shows the percentage of
news discovered in tweets during the period of our study.
Figure 4 shows the results.
As is obvious from the results in Figure 4 almost daily more
than 50% of the top news in Pakistan have a mention on the
except for just one day – there was a significant drop in the
percentage of news in tweets on 24th October, 2010 and the
reason for this was found to be due to the appearance of the
news “WikiLeaks makes fresh claim about Iraq deaths”
which shook the entire Twittersphere on an international
level. Only up to a maximum of 67% of news were
mentioned in tweets although these were news mentioned
on the front page of the Dawn.com [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ]. This proves our
original claims that traditional news services tend to ignore
user preferences for news consumption and also provide
experimental evidence for the claim that Twitter acts as an
effective news sensor for popular news topics and items.
The second set of experimental results shows the maximum
number of tweets recorded on each day for the entire period
of the experimental analysis. Figure 5 shows the results.
As is obvious from the results in Figure 5 there is a large
fluctuation in the highest number of recorded tweets per
day. This fluctuation is explained with the help of Table 2.
The table shows the event against which the highest number
of tweets were recorded for each day: the days on which
there was a huge amount of tweets marked a significant
international event that made breaking news i.e., 18th Oct.,
20th Oct. and 24th Oct. – 24th Oct. was also the day in which
the percentage of news in tweets as shown in Figure 4
dropped to 30.8%; this is reasonable because the news for
which this occurred “WikiLeaks makes fresh claim about
Iraq deaths” was also heavily tweeted by the Pakistani
Twittersphere as it also affects them. An important point to
note however is that the Dawn.com news website shows
this news quite low in the front page which again verifies
that traditional news sources have limitations due to not
taking into account the notion of “popularity over time.”
The second set of experimental results further provide
experimental evidence for our claim that Twitter acts as a
crucial information gathering point in the face of events that
make breaking news.
17th Oct.
18th Oct.
19th Oct.
20th Oct.
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>Karachi violence (local)</title>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>Hopes fade for trapped Chinese miners</title>
      <p>(international)</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
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      <p>(local)</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
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      <p>(international)</p>
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    </sec>
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      <p>(local)</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-10">
      <title>WikiLeaks makes fresh claim about Iraq</title>
      <p>deaths (international)</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-11">
      <title>Court orders Iraqi parliament back to work</title>
      <p>(international)</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-12">
      <title>SCBA presidential election (local)</title>
      <p>The third set of experimental results performed a
comparison for proving the effectiveness of the ranking
approach based on Twitter’s social graph and our proposed
hypothesis that following is to follower ratio is extremely
low for news outlets. We use Spearman’s footrule which is
a widely used measure for evaluating similarity between
two ordered lists, equation 2 shows the computation of the
Spearman’s footrule for two ordered lists L1 and L2; in the
formulation i is an element in these lists L1(i) and L2(i)
respectively</p>
      <p>Spearman(L1, L2)
| L1(i) - L2(i) |</p>
      <p>(2)
i
We ask a regular follower of news to give us a
humanranked list of the news items for the 4 days: 21st Oct-24th
Oct and this ranked list is assumed to be perfect since it was
produced by a regular Pakistani news reader. This measure
is then used to evaluate the similarity between the ranked
lists obtained using number of tweets (naive approach) and
our formulation (equation 1) as a ranking function. Table 3
shows the values of Spearman footrule for both the ranking
approaches.
6 CONCLUSIONS
We have described a general framework for integrating the
concepts of user popularity and time within the domain of
news information retrieval. Our approach is built on top of
a very popular micro-blogging service which also plays the
role of a social network – furthermore, Twitter provides
support for both the concepts that are crucial for news
retrieval systems i.e., popularity and time and we proved its
effectiveness through experiments performed on real-time
news data. The work also includes a running prototype for
real-time detection of hot news topics.</p>
      <p>Future work in this area includes several dimensions: we
plan to incorporate the third important dimension that news
retrieval systems have to deal with i.e., the news sources.
Moreover future directions also include refinement
approaches for the common entity corpus using a learning
approach which makes it adapt to the changing and
evolving news patterns. We also intend to extend the
prototype for Twitter’s real-time message feed for different
users by building it on top of the Twitter REST API.</p>
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