Mining the News: Trends, Associations, and Deviations

NEWS REPORTS ARE AN IMPORTANT SOURCE OF INFORMATION ABOUT SOCIETY. THEIR ANAYSIS ALLOWS TO UNDERSTAND ITS CURRENT INTERESTA AND TO MEASURE THE SOCIAL IMPORTANCE OF MANY EVENTS. IN THIS PAPER, WE USE THE ANALYSIS OF NEWS AS A MEANS TO EXPLORE THE SOCIETY INTERESTS. WE PRESENT A TEXT MINING TECHNIQUE THAT UNCOVERS TRENDS, DISCOVERS ASSODIATIONS AND DETECTS DEVIATIONS FROM NEWS NOTES. THE METHOD USES SIMPLE STATISTICAL REPRESENTATION OF THE NEWS REPORTS (FREQUENCIES AND TEH PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTIONS OF TOPICS) AND STATISICAL MEASURES (THE AVERGE OR MEDIAN, THE STANDARD DEVIATION, AND THE CORRELATION COEFFICIENT) FOR ANALYSIS AND DISCOVERY OF USEFUL INFORMATION. WE ILUSTRATE THE METHOD WITH SOME RESULTS OBTAINED FROM PRELIMINARY EXPERIMENTS AND D