Media analysis can reveal interesting patterns in the way newspapers report the news and how these patterns evolve over time. One example pattern is the quoting choices that media make, which could be used as bias indicators. Media slant can be expressed both with the choice of reporting an event, e.g. a person's statement, but also with the words used to describe the event. Thus, automatic discovery of systematic quoting patterns in the news could illustrate to the readers the media' beliefs, such as political preferences. In this paper, we aim to discover political media bias by demonstrating systematic patterns of reporting speech in two major British newspapers. To this end, we analyze news articles from 2000 to 2015. By taking into account different kinds of bias, such as selection, coverage and framing bias, we show that the quoting patterns of newspapers are predictable.

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, politician 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 evolves in time.

Recommendation algorithms typically work by suggesting items that are similar to the ones that a user likes, or items that similar users like. We propose a content-based recommendation technique with the focus on serendipity of news recommendations. Serendipitous recommendations have the characteristic of being unexpected yet fortunate and interesting to the user, and thus might yield higher user satisfaction. In our work, we explore the concept of serendipity in the area of news articles and propose a general framework that incorporates the benefits of serendipity- and similarity-based recommendation techniques. An evaluation against other baseline recommendation models is carried out in a user study.

Twitter has become a prime source for disseminating news and opinions. However, the length of tweets prohibits detailed descriptions, instead, tweets sometimes contain URLs that link to detailed news articles. In this paper, we devise generic techniques for recommending tweets for any given news article. To evaluate and compare the different techniques, we collected tens of thousands of tweets and news articles and conducted a user study on the relevance of recommendations.

Nowadays, an ever increasing number of news articles is published on a daily basis. Especially after notable national and international events or disasters, news coverage rises tremendously. Temporal summarization is an approach to automatically summarize such information in a timely manner. Summaries are created incrementally with progressing time, as soon as new information is available. Given a user-defined query, we designed a temporal summarizer based on probabilistic language models and entity recognition. First, all relevant documents and sentences are extracted from a stream of news documents using BM25 scoring. Second, a general query language model is created which is used to detect typical sentences respective to the query with Kullback-Leibler divergence. Based on the retrieval result, this query model is extended over time by terms appearing frequently during the particular event. Our system is evaluated with a document corpus including test data provided by the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC).

The growing number of publicly available information sources makes it impossible for individuals to keep track of all the various opinions on one topic. The goal of our Fuzzy Believer system presented in this paper is to extract and analyze statements of opinion from newspaper articles. Beliefs are modeled using the fuzzy set theory, applied after Natural Language Processing-based information extraction. The Fuzzy Believer models a human agent, deciding what statements to believe or reject based on a range of configurable strategies.