This document summarizes research on developing an automatic tool to assess the newsworthiness of news articles. It describes a collaboration between multiple labs to use natural language processing, named entity recognition, and social media analysis to analyze news articles and generate a newsworthiness report. The tool is intended to save journalists time by scanning publications and linking to up-to-date web information, while assisting rather than replacing traditional journalistic methods. Next steps involve testing the tool with real journalists.

1. ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Bringing Newsworthiness into the 21st Century
Tom De Nies,
Evelien D'Heer, Sam Coppens, Davy Van Deursen,
Erik Mannens, Steve Paulussen and Rik Van De Walle
Web of Linked Entities @ ISWC 2012
November 11th, Boston, USA

2. ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Digital Information Overflow
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Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
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3. ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Joint Effort
Social Lab
Multimedia Lab
(MICT)
News
Semantic Web
Criteria
Manual Automatically
Analysis Assisted Analysis
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
3

4. ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Newsworthiness, revisited
Presenting AVALON:
Automatic Value Assessment of News
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
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5. ELIS – Multimedia Lab
News Criteria
Frequency Unexpectedness Recency
Continuity Eliteness Showbiz/TV
Celebrities Negativity Significance
Relevance Facticity Competition
Cultural Geographical Social
Political Economical Cultural Public Technological
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
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6. ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Complex Mapping
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
6

7. ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Analysis Methods
News NER
Newsworthiness report
Article
Topic Detection
Reader targeting
Similarity Analysis
Social Media
Formatting
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
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8. ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Advantages
Saves hours of scanning through related
publications
Linked to Web, so always up to date
Enables news analysts to test traditional
methods in current media landscape
Intended as assisting tool, not as
replacement
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
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9. ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Next Steps
Take it to the real journalists!
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
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