Automatic online news topic ranking using media focus and user attention based on aging theory

  • Authors:

  • Canhui Wang;Min Zhang;Liyun Ru;Shaoping Ma

  • Affiliations:

  • Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Information and knowledge management
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

News topics, which are constructed from news stories using the techniques of Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT), bring convenience to users who intend to see what is going on through the Internet. However, it is almost impossible to view all the generated topics, because of the large amount. So it will be helpful if all topics are ranked and the top ones, which are both timely and important, can be viewed with high priority. Generally, topic ranking is determined by two primary factors. One is how frequently and recently a topic is reported by the media; the other is how much attention users pay to it. Both media focus and user attention varies as time goes on, so the effect of time on topic ranking has already been included. However, inconsistency exists between both factors. In this paper, an automatic online news topic ranking algorithm is proposed based on inconsistency analysis between media focus and user attention. News stories are organized into topics, which are ranked in terms of both media focus and user attention. Experiments performed on practical Web datasets show that the topic ranking result reflects the influence of time, the media and users. The main contributions of this paper are as follows. First, we present the quantitative measure of the inconsistency between media focus and user attention, which provides a basis for topic ranking and an experimental evidence to show that there is a gap between what the media provide and what users view. Second, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first attempt to synthesize the two factors into one algorithm for automatic online topic ranking.