Words analysis of online Chinese news headlines about trending events: a complex network perspective

PLoS One. 2015 Mar 25;10(3):e0122174. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0122174. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

Because the volume of information available online is growing at breakneck speed, keeping up with meaning and information communicated by the media and netizens is a new challenge both for scholars and for companies who must address public relations crises. Most current theories and tools are directed at identifying one website or one piece of online news and do not attempt to develop a rapid understanding of all websites and all news covering one topic. This paper represents an effort to integrate statistics, word segmentation, complex networks and visualization to analyze headlines' keywords and words relationships in online Chinese news using two samples: the 2011 Bohai Bay oil spill and the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. We gathered all the news headlines concerning the two trending events in the search results from Baidu, the most popular Chinese search engine. We used Simple Chinese Word Segmentation to segment all the headlines into words and then took words as nodes and considered adjacent relations as edges to construct word networks both using the whole sample and at the monthly level. Finally, we develop an integrated mechanism to analyze the features of words' networks based on news headlines that can account for all the keywords in the news about a particular event and therefore track the evolution of news deeply and rapidly.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • China
  • Internet
  • Language
  • Newspapers as Topic*

Grants and funding

This research is supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71173199), the China Scholarship Council (File No. 201406400004), the Humanities and Social Sciences planning funds project under the Ministry of Education of the PRC (Grant No.10YJA630001), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 2-9-2014-104), the Science and Technology Innovation Fund of the China University of Geosciences (Beijing), and the Key Laboratory of Carrying Capacity Assessment for Resource and the Environment (No. CCA2015.05). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.