Discovering News Frames: Exploring Text, Content, and Concepts in Online News Sources to Address Water Insecurity in the Southwest Region

摘要

The Internet is a major source of online news content. Current efforts to evaluate online news content, including text, story line and sources is limited by the use of small-scale manual techniques that are time consuming and dependent on human judgments. This article explores the use of machine learning algorithms and mathematical techniques for Internet-scale data mining and semantic discovery of news content that will enable researchers to mine, analyze and visualize large-scale datasets. This research has the potential to inform the integration and application of data mining to address real-world socio-environmental issues, including water insecurity in the Southwestern United States. This paper establishes a formal definition of framing and proposes an approach for the discovery of distinct patterns that characterize prominent frames. Our experimental evaluation shows that the proposed process is an effective and efficient semi-supervised machine learning method to inform data mining for inferring classification.