Multiple developing news stories identified and tracked by social insects and visualized using the new galactic streams and concurrent streams metaphors

Abstract

We have developed an approach to identification and tracking of currently unfolding news stories extracted from the news articles published on the Web. Our approach employs a set of agents to retrieve those articles from the Web that might refer to some developing news story. The set of agents is inspired by social insects, in particular by a bee colony. Bees identify popular terms, referred to as story words, relevant to the ongoing news stories and use them in foraging articles. This allows for a dynamic approach that reflects the changes in article space as new stories unfold and new articles are added. Subsequently a graph representation of the article space is constructed that contains retrieved articles and identified story words interconnected by edges according to relationships of relevance identified between elements of the graph. Stories are then extracted from the constructed graph by using Louvain method, commonly used to identify communities within modular graphs. Using this approach we have been able to identify news stories in a stream of articles retrieved from the Web with precision of 75.56%, with best precision generally achieved for recent news stories described by popular story words. Further we developed ways of visualization of multiple stories represented by sets of articles ordered in time. We propose two new metaphors both employing an exponential timeline. Both galactic streams and concurrent streams are highly suitable for visualizing multiple developing stories.