Changing Dynamics of News

Information and communication technologies enable us to gather vast amounts of data in a short time period; news on current events is a particularly plentiful information stream.

Since it is not possible to evaluate all this data manually, yet there is a journalistic and public need to maintain at least some grip on the developments, we need to build systems that can turn this data into information for different purposes in time. While the purpose of automatic analysis has been mainly the identification of factual information so far, it should now be enhanced to take into account other dimensions of the information beyond the mere factual, such as temporal, epistemic and volitional qualifications. In my PhD project, publicly available microblogging platforms such as twitter.com, identi.ca, rstat.us, etc. and traditional news media will be taken into account.

Differences between the organization of the information between different sources will be analyzed and bridged (e.g. to connect micro blogs and news releases to the same event) to be able to benefit from the available data as much as possible.