When newsworthy events occur, the information quickly spreads via online channels – both in terms of being distributed by official news services as well as being shared and commented on by individual users on social media plat- forms. Information diffusion models can help to uncover the path of an emerging online story across these channels, and shed light on how the channels interact. The presented work enables journalists and other stakeholders to trace back the distribution process of news stories, and to identify their origin as well as central information hubs who have amplified their dissemination.

1. Workshop on Recent Trends in News Information Retrieval – Padova, 20 March 2016
Know which Way the Wind Blows:
Visualising the Propagation of News
on the Web
Svitlana Vakulenko, Max Göbel,
Arno Scharl and Lyndon Nixon

2. Workshop on Recent Trends in News Information Retrieval – Padova, 20 March 2016
Modeling Contagions
▪ Document Representation Model
Bag-of-Relations, Dependency Parsing
▪ Relation Extraction
s (subject) – p (predicate) – o (object)
▪ Predicate Disambiguation
Wordnet Synsets, Lemmatization, Heuristics
Example: “The plane landed in Panama on Tuesday”
‘plane - land D’
‘plane - land D - in Panama’
‘plane - land D - on Tuesday’

3. Workshop on Recent Trends in News Information Retrieval – Padova, 20 March 2016
Modeling Diffusion Cascades
▪ Article → Article
Implicit Links: Relation-Based Similarity
i. Bag-of-Relations
ii. Nilsimsa Hash
iii. Hamming Distance
▪ Tweet → Tweet / Article
Implicit Links: Pheme D3.1
Explicit Links: Reply, Retweet, Article URL

4. Workshop on Recent Trends in News Information Retrieval – Padova, 20 March 2016
Results: Implicit Network
s: president b. obama – p: state D – o:*
70k news articles 27 Nov - 03 Dec 2015

5. Workshop on Recent Trends in News Information Retrieval – Padova, 20 March 2016
Results: News Clusters
s: president b. obama – p: state D – o:*
70k news articles 27 Nov - 03 Dec 2015

6. Workshop on Recent Trends in News Information Retrieval – Padova, 20 March 2016
One-Thousand News Articles
▪ 10% of the Signal Media Dataset (Data challenge)
▪ Identified relation-based topics:
4-28 September 2015: Discussion around raising of the interest
rate by the Federal Reserve (''raise interest rate`` - 18 articles);
12-25 September 2015: Updates on European migrant crisis (''huge
number people travel across europe`` - 29 articles, ''late development
european government rush cope`` - 22 articles);
19 September 2015: Death of Brian Sewell (''die D veteran art critic
broadcaster brian sewell`` - 5 articles);
22 September 2015: Ferguson backs van Gaal (''sir alex ferguson
back louis van gaal`` - 5 articles);

7. Workshop on Recent Trends in News Information Retrieval – Padova, 20 March 2016
FIFA Corruption Case
▪ 25 September 2015: Opening of a criminal investigation against
FIFA President Sepp Blatter in Switzerland (''open D swiss
prosecutor`` - 5 articles).

8. Workshop on Recent Trends in News Information Retrieval – Padova, 20 March 2016
Diffusion Cascades
1 This is the West Country -> 2 Irish Times -> 4 Harrow Times
[u'open D criminal proceeding', u'open D fifa president sepp blatter']
"Swiss prosecutors have opened criminal proceedings against FIFA
president Sepp Blatter"
1 This is the West Country -> 2 Irish Times
[u'open D day stunning development']
“..on a day of stunning developments at football's world governing body."
3 Yahoo! Maktoob News -> 5 NigerianHerald.com
[u'open D criminal investigation']
"Swiss prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation"

9. Workshop on Recent Trends in News Information Retrieval – Padova, 20 March 2016
Germanwings Flight 9525
9200 Twitter Postings
Red: Rumours
Blue: Non-Rumours
31 News Articles
Yellow: 4U 9525 Coverage
24 March - 1 April 2015

10. Workshop on Recent Trends in News Information Retrieval – Padova, 20 March 2016
Social Network Analysis | Indegree Centrality for Depression-Related Tweets as of February 2016