ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Tom De Nies
Ghent University – iMinds – MMLab
http://users.ugent.be/~tdenies
@TomDeNies
Towards Automatic Assessment of the Social
Media Impact of News Content
Presentation at SNOW2013, First Workshop on Social News on the Web
@ WWW '13, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

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ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Towards Automatic Assessment of the Social Media Impact of News Content @SNOW 2013
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
13/05/2013
Digital Information Overflow
?
?
?
?
?

3
ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Towards Automatic Assessment of the Social Media Impact of News Content @SNOW 2013
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
13/05/2013
Journalists need recommendations

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ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Towards Automatic Assessment of the Social Media Impact of News Content @SNOW 2013
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
13/05/2013
Social readers provide recommendations

5
ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Towards Automatic Assessment of the Social Media Impact of News Content @SNOW 2013
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
13/05/2013
…and our job is to link them!
!


+
!
?

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ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Towards Automatic Assessment of the Social Media Impact of News Content @SNOW 2013
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
13/05/2013
Find related microposts on social media for input news
article
Find related microposts on social media for input news
article
Assessing Social Impact
endorsement influence

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ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Towards Automatic Assessment of the Social Media Impact of News Content @SNOW 2013
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
13/05/2013
Social Media Impact

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ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Towards Automatic Assessment of the Social Media Impact of News Content @SNOW 2013
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
13/05/2013
Architecture Overview

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ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Towards Automatic Assessment of the Social Media Impact of News Content @SNOW 2013
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
13/05/2013
• Twitter Streaming API
• 1% of ALL tweets
• Cached for one week
in Solr
• Indexed on text
+ followers count
• REST API
POC: Twitter

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ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Towards Automatic Assessment of the Social Media Impact of News Content @SNOW 2013
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
13/05/2013
POC setup
Article
Keywords
Our twitterstore
REST API
tweets
# followers
# retweets

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ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Towards Automatic Assessment of the Social Media Impact of News Content @SNOW 2013
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
13/05/2013
POC

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ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Towards Automatic Assessment of the Social Media Impact of News Content @SNOW 2013
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
13/05/2013
Next Steps

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ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Towards Automatic Assessment of the Social Media Impact of News Content @SNOW 2013
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
13/05/2013
Needs more social…
Social Media Toolkit

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ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Towards Automatic Assessment of the Social Media Impact of News Content @SNOW 2013
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
13/05/2013
Bad news is also news!
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

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ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Towards Automatic Assessment of the Social Media Impact of News Content @SNOW 2013
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
13/05/2013
• Union of keywords
• Intersection of keywords
• TF-IDF
• Common Named Entities
• …
Metrics, Means & Measures

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ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Towards Automatic Assessment of the Social Media Impact of News Content @SNOW 2013
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
13/05/2013
Take it to the real journalists!
→ Compare
human assessment vs. automatic assessment
How do we evaluate this?

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ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Towards Automatic Assessment of the Social Media Impact of News Content @SNOW 2013
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
13/05/2013
Join forces
MICT Multimedia Lab
• Social Sciences Lab
• Focus on Newsworthiness
• Computer Science Lab
• Focus on Semantic/Social
Web technologies

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ELIS – Multimedia Lab
Towards Automatic Assessment of the Social Media Impact of News Content @SNOW 2013
Tom De Nies (iMinds-MMLab)
13/05/2013
Questions/Feedback