NewsViz: extraction and visualisation of emotions from news articles

E Hanser, P McKevitt

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

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Abstract

News is commonly intended to be delivered in an objective, unbiased manner and therefore presented plainly and formally, even though its content often affects readers emotionally. The NewsViz system aims to enhance the news reading experience by integrating 30 seconds long Flash-animations into news article web pages depicting their content and emotional aspects. NewsViz interprets football news texts automatically and creates abstract 2Dvisualisations. The user interface enables animators to further refine animations. Here we focus on the emotion extraction component of NewsViz which facilitates subtle background visualisation. The emphasis of NewsViz lies on expression, impacting on the reader’s understanding of the article and making it more memorable. NewsViz detects moods from news reports. The original text is part-of-speech tagged and adjectives and/or nouns, the word types conveying most emotional meaning, are filtered out and labelled with an emotion and intensity value. Subsequently reoccurring emotions are joined into longer lasting moods and matched with appropriate animation presets. Different linguistic analysis methods were tested on NewsViz: word-by-word, sentence based and incremental minimum threshold summarisation, to find a minimum number of occurrences of an emotion in forming a valid mood. NewsViz proved to be viable for the fixed domain of football news, grasping the overall moods and some more detailed emotions precisely. NewsViz introduces a novel approach to a universally applicable emotion scheme which offers an efficient technique to cater for the production of a large number of daily updated news stories. NewsViz fills the gap of lack of information for background or environment depiction encountered in similar applications. Further development may refine the detection of emotion shifts through summarisation with the full implementation of football and common linguistic knowledge. Future work will reveal whether NewsViz is feasible when extended to different domains.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationUnknown Host Publication
Place of PublicationUniversity of Ulster
PublisherISEA International
Pages1-6
Number of pages6
ISBN (Print)978-1-905902-05-7
Publication statusPublished (in print/issue) - Mar 2010
EventProc. of the 15th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA 2009) - Waterfront Hall, Belfast, Northern Ireland
Duration: 1 Mar 2010 → …

Conference

ConferenceProc. of the 15th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA 2009)
Period1/03/10 → …

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