Information Technology Reference
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identifies thematically connected topics. It even extracts quotations and their polarity
toward the contained opinion target”. Clara had already worked for 2 months for the
newspaper but had never heard of such a system. Fortunately, Martha told her now
because 10 min ago she was on the verge of discarding her evening plans and working
overtime instead of going to the cinema. She grabbed her coffee cup and returned to
the office with a smile on her face—her evening was saved.
1.1 Introduction
In times of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media services news is broadcast
around the world in no time at all. If something more or less newsworthy happens,
users immediately take their smartphones and post it. Today's social media services
bring a lot of benefits. For example, it is not possible to imagine reporting without
Twitter from crisis regions. Still, since potentially everyone may distribute infor-
mation, the question of reliability arises. In 2013, the ambiguous Twitter hashtag
#nowthatchersdead
confused a wide range of Twitter followers.
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Many users
interpreted the hashtag as “Now that Cher's dead” and retweeted that the pop queen
Cher has died. In reality, the death of the former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
(“Now Thatcher's dead”) was announced. This example shows how fast rumors may
come up and be spread around if no professional journalists are involved. Thus, edito-
rially written news articles still remain one of the most important information sources.
In comparison to user-generated reports on the Web, journalistic work of rep-
utable news agencies is considered reliable and credible. News articles are thor-
oughly researched and well formulated and they often report not only the piece of
news itself but also provide additional context and background information. Besides,
local newspapers or special issues on specific topics may cover topics not mentioned
in social media which still are important for a large number of readers. As with user-
generated content, the amount of editorially prepared news material is remarkable.
In general, print media publish their data also on the Web and in addition there are
numerous online news papers available.
The range of available news material allows users to stay informed about what
happened and to look at news from different points of view. At the same time the
considerable number of news articles complicates their handling and requires tools
for helping the users to search and browse them. News aggregation systems support
users in exploring news articles by analyzing and organizing news articles. To avoid
information overload, they first detect (nearly) duplicate news articles and hide them
from the reader. This is necessary because news articles published by well-known
press agencies like
dpa
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(Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH) are redistributed by var-
ious news providers. Then, their main task is to identify news articles dealing with
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