The paper titled 'Identifying Political Bias in News Articles' by Konstantina Lazaridou and Dr. Ralf Krestel has been selected to be presented at the 20th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) at the Doctoral Consortium Workshop in Hannover in September.

Abstract

Individuals' political leaning, such as journalists', politicians' etc. often shapes the public opinion over several issues. In the case of online journalism, due to the numerous ongoing events, newspapers have to choose which stories to cover, emphasize on and possibly express their opinion about. These choices depict their profile and could reveal a potential bias towards a certain perspective or political position. Likewise, politicians' choice of language and the issues they broach, are an indication of their beliefs and political orientation. Given the amount of user-generated text content online, such as news articles, blog posts, politican statements etc., automatically analyzing this information becomes increasingly interesting, in order to understand what people stand for and how they influence the general public. In this PhD thesis, we analyze UK news corpora along with parliament speeches in order to identify potential political media bias. We currently examine the politicians' mentions and their quotes in news articles and how this referencing pattern of the newspapers evolves in time.