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Mass media sentiment of financial news significantly influences investment decisions of investors. Hence, studying how this sentiment emerges is important. In years past, this was straightforward, often dictated by journalists who cover financial news, but this has become more complex now. In this paper, we focus on how social media sentiment affects mass media sentiment. Using data from Sina Weibo and Sina Finance (around 60 million weibos and 6.2 million news articles), we show that social media does influence mass media sentiment emergence for financial news. The sentiment consistency between social media reaction and prior news articles amplifies the persistence of mass media sentiment over time. By contrast, we found limited evidence of social media reducing the persistence of mass media sentiment over time. The results have significant implications for understanding how 2 types of media, treated separately in the literature, may be connected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies become more ubiquitous for streamlining and optimizing work, they are entering fields representing organizational logics at odds with the efficiency logic of automation. One such field is journalism, an industry defined by a logic enacted through professional norms, practices, and values. This paper examines the experience of technologists developing and employing natural language generation (NLG) in news organizations, looking at how they situate themselves and their technology in relation to newswork. Drawing on institutional logics, a theoretical framework from organizational theory, we show how technologists shape their logic for building these emerging technologies based on a theory of rationalizing news organizations, a frame of optimizing newswork, and a narrative of news organizations misinterpreting the technology. Our interviews reveal technologists mitigating tensions with journalistic logic and newswork by labeling stories generated by their systems as nonjournalistic content, seeing their technology as a solution for improving journalism, enabling newswork to move away from routine tasks. We also find that as technologists interact with news organizations, they assimilate elements from journalistic logic beneficial for benchmarking their technology for more lucrative industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

User engagement (UE) is a quality of user experience characterized by the depth of an actor's cognitive, temporal, and/or emotional investment in an interaction with a digital system. Currently more art than science, UE has gained theoretical and methodological traction over the past decade, yet there is still a need to establish empirical links between UE and desired outcomes (e.g., learning, behavior change), and to understand the myriad user, system, contextual, and so on, factors that predict successful digital engagement. This paper focuses on the relationship between UE and media format as a potential antecedent, and the outcome of learning, operationalized as short-term knowledge retention. Participants interacted with two human-interest stories in one of four media formats: video, audio, narrative text, or transcript-style text; short-term knowledge retention was measured using post-task multiple choice and short-answer questions. It was anticipated that format would have a strong effect on UE, and that more engaged users would recall more information about the stories. However, these hypotheses were not fully supported, and the nature of the relationship between UE and learning was more nuanced than expected. This research has implications for the design of information systems and, more fundamentally, the impetus to make digital environments engaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global popularity of microblogs has led to an increasing accumulation of large volumes of text data on microblogging platforms such as Twitter. These corpora are untapped resources to understand social expressions on diverse subjects. Microblog analysis aims to unlock the value of such expressions by discovering insights and events of significance hidden among swathes of text. Besides velocity; diversity of content, brevity, absence of structure and time-sensitivity are key challenges in microblog analysis. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised incremental machine learning and event detection technique to address these challenges. The proposed technique separates a microblog discussion into topics to address the key problem of diversity. It maintains a record of the evolution of each topic over time. Brevity, time-sensitivity and unstructured nature are addressed by these individual topic pathways which contribute to generate a temporal, topic-driven structure of a microblog discussion. The proposed event detection method continuously monitors these topic pathways using multiple domain-independent event indicators for events of significance. The autonomous nature of topic separation, topic pathway generation, new topic identification and event detection, appropriates the proposed technique for extensive applications in microblog analysis. We demonstrate these capabilities on tweets containing #microsoft and tweets containing #obama. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prominent news sites on the web provide hundreds of news articles daily. The abundance of news content competing to attract online attention, coupled with the manual effort involved in article selection, necessitates the timely prediction of future popularity of these news articles. The future popularity of a news article can be estimated using signals indicating the article's penetration in social media (e.g., number of tweets) in addition to traditional web analytics (e.g., number of page views). In practice, it is important to make such estimations as early as possible, preferably before the article is made available on the news site (i.e., at cold start). In this paper we perform a study on cold-start news popularity prediction using a collection of 13,319 news articles obtained from Yahoo News, a major news provider. We characterize the popularity of news articles through a set of online metrics and try to predict their values across time using machine learning techniques on a large collection of features obtained from various sources. Our findings indicate that predicting news popularity at cold start is a difficult task, contrary to the findings of a prior work on the same topic. Most articles' popularity may not be accurately anticipated solely on the basis of content features, without having the early-stage popularity values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, many information retrieval models assume that terms occur in documents independently. Although these models have already shown good performance, the word independency assumption seems to be unrealistic from a natural language point of view, which considers that terms are related to each other. Therefore, such an assumption leads to two well-known problems in information retrieval ( IR), namely, polysemy, or term mismatch, and synonymy. In language models, these issues have been addressed by considering dependencies such as bigrams, phrasal-concepts, or word relationships, but such models are estimated using simple n-grams or concept counting. In this paper, we address polysemy and synonymy mismatch with a concept-based language modeling approach that combines ontological concepts from external resources with frequently found collocations from the document collection. In addition, the concept-based model is enriched with subconcepts and semantic relationships through a semantic smoothing technique so as to perform semantic matching. Experiments carried out on TREC collections show that our model achieves significant improvements over a single word-based model and the Markov Random Field model (using a Markov classifier). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a diffusion model to measure the evolution of stakeholders' disaster perceptions by integrating a disaster message model, a stakeholder model, and a stakeholder memory model, which collectively describe the process of information flow. Simulation results show that the rate of forgetting has a significantly negative effect on stakeholders' perceptions and the incremental increase in the number of affected individuals has a positive effect on the maximum level of stakeholders' perceptions, but negative effect on the duration of stakeholders' perceptions. Additionally, a delay effect, a stagnation effect, and a cumulative effect exist in the evolution of stakeholders' perceptions. There is a spike at the beginning of the profile of stakeholders' perceptions in the Damped Exponential Model. An empirical test supports the validity of this model of stakeholders' disaster perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how privacy as an ethical concept exists in two languages: Mandarin Chinese and American English. The exploration relies on two genres of corpora from 10 years: social media posts and news articles, 2010–2019. A mixed‐methods approach combining structural topic modeling (STM) and human interpretation were used to work with the data. Findings show various privacy‐related topics across the two languages. Moreover, some of these different topics revealed fundamental incompatibilities for understanding privacy across these two languages. In other words, some of the variations of topics do not just reflect contextual differences; they reveal how the two languages value privacy in different ways that can relate back to the society's ethical tradition. This study is one of the first empirically grounded intercultural explorations of the concept of privacy. It has shown that natural language is promising to operationalize intercultural and comparative privacy research, and it provides an examination of the concept as it is understood in these two languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fine‐grained financial sentiment analysis on news headlines is a challenging task requiring human‐annotated datasets to achieve high performance. Limited studies have tried to address the sentiment extraction task in a setting where multiple entities are present in a news headline. In an effort to further research in this area, we make publicly available SEntFiN 1.0, a human‐annotated dataset of 10,753 news headlines with entity‐sentiment annotations, of which 2,847 headlines contain multiple entities, often with conflicting sentiments. We augment our dataset with a database of over 1,000 financial entities and their various representations in news media amounting to over 5,000 phrases. We propose a framework that enables the extraction of entity‐relevant sentiments using a feature‐based approach rather than an expression‐based approach. For sentiment extraction, we utilize 12 different learning schemes utilizing lexicon‐based and pretrained sentence representations and five classification approaches. Our experiments indicate that lexicon‐based N‐gram ensembles are above par with pretrained word embedding schemes such as GloVe. Overall, RoBERTa and finBERT (domain‐specific BERT) achieve the highest average accuracy of 94.29% and F1‐score of 93.27%. Further, using over 210,000 entity‐sentiment predictions, we validate the economic effect of sentiments on aggregate market movements over a long duration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our consumption of online information is mediated by filtering, ranking, and recommendation algorithms that introduce unintentional biases as they attempt to deliver relevant and engaging content. It has been suggested that our reliance on online technologies such as search engines and social media may limit exposure to diverse points of view and make us vulnerable to manipulation by disinformation. In this article, we mine a massive data set of web traffic to quantify two kinds of bias: (i) homogeneity bias, which is the tendency to consume content from a narrow set of information sources, and (ii) popularity bias, which is the selective exposure to content from top sites. Our analysis reveals different bias levels across several widely used web platforms. Search exposes users to a diverse set of sources, while social media traffic tends to exhibit high popularity and homogeneity bias. When we focus our analysis on traffic to news sites, we find higher levels of popularity bias, with smaller differences across applications. Overall, our results quantify the extent to which our choices of online systems confine us inside "social bubbles." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study how collective memories are formed online. We do so by tracking entities that emerge in public discourse, that is, in online text streams such as social media and news streams, before they are incorporated into Wikipedia, which, we argue, can be viewed as an online place for collective memory. By tracking how entities emerge in public discourse, that is, the temporal patterns between their first mention in online text streams and subsequent incorporation into collective memory, we gain insights into how the collective remembrance process happens online. Specifically, we analyze nearly 80,000 entities as they emerge in online text streams before they are incorporated into Wikipedia. The online text streams we use for our analysis comprise of social media and news streams, and span over 579 million documents in a time span of 18 months. We discover two main emergence patterns: entities that emerge in a “bursty” fashion, that is, that appear in public discourse without a precedent, blast into activity and transition into collective memory. Other entities display a “delayed” pattern, where they appear in public discourse, experience a period of inactivity, and then resurface before transitioning into our cultural collective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A story chain is a set of related news articles that reveal how different events are connected. This study presents a framework for discovering story chains, given an input document, in a text collection. The framework has 3 complementary parts that i) scan the collection, ii) measure the similarity between chain-member candidates and the chain, and iii) measure similarity among news articles. For scanning, we apply a novel text-mining method that uses a zigzagged search that reinvestigates past documents based on the updated chain. We also utilize social networks of news actors to reveal connections among news articles. We conduct 2 user studies in terms of 4 effectiveness measures- relevance, coverage, coherence, and ability to disclose relations. The first user study compares several versions of the framework, by varying parameters, to set a guideline for use. The second compares the framework with 3 baselines. The results show that our method provides statistically significant improvement in effectiveness in 61% of pairwise comparisons, with medium or large effect size; in the remainder, none of the baselines significantly outperforms our method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online trolling has become increasingly prevalent and visible in online communities. Perceptions of and reactions to trolling behaviors varies significantly from one community to another, as trolling behaviors are contextual and vary across platforms and communities. Through an examination of seven trolling scenarios, this article intends to answer the following questions: how do trolling behaviors differ across contexts; how do perceptions of trolling differ from case to case; and what aspects of context of trolling are perceived to be important by the public? Based on focus groups and interview data, we discuss the ways in which community norms and demographics, technological features of platforms, and community boundaries are perceived to impact trolling behaviors. Two major contributions of the study include a codebook to support future analysis of trolling and formal concept analysis surrounding contextual perceptions of trolling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although news stories target the general public and are sometimes inaccurate, they can serve as sources of real-world information for researchers. This article investigates the extent to which academics exploit journalism using content and citation analyses of online BBC News stories cited by Scopus articles. A total of 27,234 Scopus-indexed publications have cited at least one BBC News story, with a steady annual increase. Citations from the arts and humanities (2.8% of publications in 2015) and social sciences (1.5%) were more likely than citations from medicine (0.1%) and science (<0.1%). Surprisingly, half of the sampled Scopus-cited science and technology (53%) and medicine and health (47%) stories were based on academic research, rather than otherwise unpublished information, suggesting that researchers have chosen a lower-quality secondary source for their citations. Nevertheless, the BBC News stories that were most frequently cited by Scopus, Google Books, and Wikipedia introduced new information from many different topics, including politics, business, economics, statistics, and reports about events. Thus, news stories are mediating real-world knowledge into the academic domain, a potential cause for concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the news reading behavior of several hundred thousand users on 65 highly visited news sites. We focus on a specific phenomenon: users reading several articles related to a particular news development, which we call story-focused reading. Our goal is to understand the effect of story-focused reading on user engagement and how news sites can support this phenomenon. We found that most users focus on stories that interest them and that even casual news readers engage in story-focused reading. During story-focused reading, users spend more time reading and a larger number of news sites are involved. In addition, readers employ different strategies to find articles related to a story. We also analyze how news sites promote story-focused reading by looking at how they link their articles to related content published by them, or by other sources. The results show that providing links to related content leads to a higher engagement of the users, and that this is the case even for links to external sites. We also show that the performance of links can be affected by their type, their position, and how many of them are present within an article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the Internet has become a major source for accessing news, there is little research regarding users' experience with news sites. We conducted an experiment to test a comprehensive model of user experience with news sites that was developed previously by means of an online survey. Level of adoption (novel or adopted site) was controlled with a between-subjects manipulation. We collected participants' answers to psychometric scales at 2 times: after presentation of 5 screenshots of a news site and directly after 10 minutes of hands-on experience with the site. The model was extended with the prediction of users' satisfaction with news sites as a high-level design goal. A psychometric measure of trust in news providers was developed and added to the model to better predict people's intention to use particular news sites. The model presented in this article represents a theoretically founded, empirically tested basis for evaluating news websites, and it holds theoretical relevance to user-experience research in general. Finally, the findings and the model are applied to provide practical guidance in design prioritization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the rapidly evolving technology world blogs have become a popular genre of communication. Their potential influence on decision making is the focus of the present research. Based on interplay between Social Judgment Theory and Framing Theory this study investigates whether the information delivered by technology blogs is treated differently during investment decision making than information from traditional financial newspapers in digital form, while containing information cues and text framing. Using an online experiment with a 3 × 2 design, this research compares the influence of this trio of variables on the investment decisions of 236 participants. Results indicate a complex investment decision-making process differing according to the type of medium presented, the text framing, the information cues, and the decision maker's background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although news websites are used by a large and increasing number of people, there is a lack of research within human-computer interaction regarding users' experience with this type of interactive technology. In the current research, existing measures of user-experience factors were identified and, using an online survey, answers to psychometric scales to measure website characteristics, need fulfillment, affective reactions, and constructs of technology acceptance and user experience were collected from regular users of news sites. A comprehensive user-experience model was formulated to explain acceptance and quality judgments of news sites. The main contribution of the current study is the application of influential models of user experience and technology acceptance to the domain of online news. By integrating both types of variable in a comprehensive model, the relationships between the types of variable are clarified both theoretically and empirically. Implications of the model for theory, further research, and system design are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze access statistics of 150 blog entries and news articles for periods of up to 3 years. Access rate falls as an inverse power of time passed since publication. The power law holds for periods of up to 1,000 days. The exponents are different for different blogs and are distributed between 0.6 and 3.2. We argue that the decay of attention to a web article is caused by the link to it first dropping down the list of links on the website's front page and then disappearing from the front page and its subsequent movement further into background. The other proposed explanations that use a decaying with time novelty factor, or some intricate theory of human dynamics, cannot explain all of the experimental observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]