Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The significance of multilingual datasets for Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) research cannot be exaggerated. The lack of publicly available, annotated, multilingual datasets prompted this effort. Moreover, Arabic is one of the languages for which annotated datasets are not widely available. In this post, we present a collection of Arabic and English news URLs dataset collected from four different major Arabic and English news outlets that are geared towards Arabs, English speaking Arabs, Arabic speakers around the world, and English speakers who are interested in the Arabic narratives of world news ( Aljazeera Arabic , Alarabiya , Aljazeera English , and Arab News ). Such a collection can be used to conduct research on web archiving, news similarity, machine translation (MT), Arabic Named Entity Recognition and Classification (NERC), and perform a systematic comparisons of different approaches. We examined multiple ways to collect news stories' URLs from multiple news ...

Fig. 1: Fig. 1 (Click on image to expand): Story Attention Dynamics chart illustrating the life-cycle of two top news stories from May 18, 2018 -- May 19, 2018. Each line (red or blue) represents a top news story. The x-axis represents time while the y-axis represents the average degree of Connected Components (representation of story). Within our window of observation, the  Santa Fe High School Shooting   story received peak attention on Friday May 18, 2018 at 4:40PM, this attention waned with the lowest point coinciding with the rise of a new story, the  Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle . News stories are born expected or unexpected, big or small, compete for attention with sibling stories or enjoy the spotlight alone, live short or long lives, and exit through death or hibernation.  Since August 2017, every 10-minutes, StoryGraph has been quantifying the attention given to news stories. In the past three years, we have seen threats of war , hurrica...

A tweet on September 20, 2020 suggested that the news media was normalizing death not treating the two milestones (100,000 vs. 200,000) of COVID-19 deaths the same. If we look at the quoted tweet closer, we can see that it is a side by side of two front pages of the New York Times. The image on the left shows a full page of names of people who have died due to COVID-19 near the 100,000 milestone. This front page is from May 24, 2020. The image on the right shows a New York Times front page near the 200,000 milestone. That front page is from September 20, 2020. The milestone story is not featured on this page. However, the dates of these two newspapers are not the actual milestone dates. If we evaluate the front page of each web site for other news sources, how did they prioritize these milestones? Are they displayed prominently? How prominently? Are they ranked first? Second? How far into the page does one need to scan before they see a news article mentioning these milestone...