Abstract

The NewsViz system aims to enhance news reading experiences by integrating 30 seconds long Flash-animations into news article web pages depicting their content and emotional aspects. NewsViz interprets football match news texts automatically and creates abstract 2D visualizations. The user interface enables animators to further refine the animations.Here, we focus on the emotion extraction component of NewsViz which facilitates subtle background visualization. NewsViz detects moods from news reports. The original text is part-of-speech tagged and adjectives and/or nouns, the word types conveying most emotional meaning, are filtered out and labeled with an emotion and intensity value. Subsequently reoccurring emotions are joined into longer lasting moods and matched with appropriate animation presets. Different linguistic analysis methods were tested on NewsViz: word-by-word, sentence-based and minimum threshold summarization, to find a minimum number of occurrences of an emotion in forming a valid mood. NewsViz proved to be viable for the fixed domain of football news, grasping the overall moods and some more detailed emotions precisely. NewsViz offers an efficient technique to cater for the production of a large number of daily updated news stories. NewsViz bypasses the lack of information for background or environment depiction encountered in similar applications.Further development may refine the detection of emotion shifts through summarization with the full implementation of football and common linguistic knowledge.