PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Carnegie Mellon researchers say readers' identities can reveal much about content of articles

Applications include improved recommendation systems

2013-08-12
(Press-News.org) PITTSBURGH -- Articles that people share on social networks can reveal a lot about those readers, research has shown. But a new Carnegie Mellon University study reverses the proposition, asking the question: What can be learned about an article from the attributes of its readers?

To find out, the CMU researchers, along with colleagues at the University of Washington, analyzed almost 3 million news articles and the public profiles of the people who shared those articles on Twitter. This enabled them to generate a few thousand "badges" that characterized the content of the shared news articles and also could be used to analyze any subsequent article, including those that had never been shared or even read.

"Because these badges are based on the readers' self-described interests, rather than only on the words in each article, we found that the badges provide a consistent, reliable means of representing content," said Khalid El-Arini, a recent Ph.D. graduate of the CMU Computer Science Department. "For instance, while what it means to be 'liberal' changes from month to month, there will always be people who describe themselves as 'liberal' on Twitter, allowing us to produce a direct correspondence between 'liberal' topics from different periods of time."

This approach could thus be used in recommendation systems, but also can provide interesting insights about writers and the state of political discourse.

El-Arini will present the findings today at the Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2013) in Chicago. Other investigators were Min Xu, a Ph.D. student in CMU's Machine Learning Department; Emily Fox, assistant professor of statistics at the University of Washington, and Carlos Guestrin, professor of computer science and engineering at Washington.

In order to train their model, the team began by looking at three months of tweets -- from September of 2010, 2011 and 2012 -- and selecting those that included links to mainstream news articles and came from a user who had filled out a Twitter profile.

Each news article was then downloaded and the most meaningful, unique words were extracted, creating a "bag of words" for each article; similar to a visual word cloud, these bags give greater weight to more important words. Likewise, from each user's Twitter profile, a set of descriptive words, or badges, was extracted.

By comparing the bags of words with badges from the people who shared the articles, the researchers were able to create a dictionary that associated each badge with its characteristic words. For example, people who self-identify with the music badge in their profiles are likely to share articles with words such as "band," "album" and "song." Different dictionaries were created for each year to compensate for interests or topics that change over time. These dictionaries were then used to encode new articles, leading to a document representation based on attributes of potential readers.

"It is important to point out that the badge dictionaries can be used to encode articles never before seen or shared," El-Arini said. "We take the content of the articles, and use our model to predict which types of readers would be likely to share them."

The researchers included a case study that used badges to explore the readership of prominent political columnists. This method showed, not surprisingly, that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd had readers who tended to be progressive. This association was notable because Dowd never explicitly uses the word "progressive" in the articles analyzed by the researchers. Rather, the algorithm detected that the words Dowd uses in these articles correspond to the type of content self-described progressives tend to share on Twitter.

El-Arini, now a research scientist at Facebook, said the algorithm the team designed also takes into account relationships between badges. The system understands, for instance, that "liberal" is similar to "progressive" and "school" is associated with "student."

"Our methodology leads to thematically coherent topics that are more consistent over time than popular alternative approaches," El-Arini said. "We believe this method will lead to better performance on personalization tasks."

###

This research was partially supported by the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

About Carnegie Mellon University: Carnegie Mellon is a private, internationally ranked research university with programs in areas ranging from science, technology and business, to public policy, the humanities and the arts. More than 12,000 students in the university's seven schools and colleges benefit from a small student-to-faculty ratio and an education characterized by its focus on creating and implementing solutions for real problems, interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation. A global university, Carnegie Mellon has campuses in Pittsburgh, Pa., California's Silicon Valley and Qatar, and programs in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and Mexico. The university recently completed "Inspire Innovation: The Campaign for Carnegie Mellon University," exceeding its $1 billion goal to build its endowment, support faculty, students and innovative research, and enhance the physical campus with equipment and facility improvements. The campaign closed June 30, 2013.


ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Rice writes rules for gene-therapy vectors

2013-08-12
HOUSTON -- Rice University researchers are making strides toward a set of rules to custom-design Lego-like viral capsid proteins for gene therapy. A new paper by Rice scientists Junghae Suh and Jonathan Silberg and their students details their use of computational and bioengineering methods to combine pieces of very different adeno-associated viruses (AAVs) to create new, benign viruses that can deliver DNA payloads to specific cells. The research appears this month in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Synthetic Biology. AAVs are found in nature and commonly ...

Onsite colposcopy clinic improves cancer screening rates: Study

2013-08-12
TORONTO, ON, August 12, 2013 – Women who had a colposcopy at a sexual health clinic that provided extra support and counselling were 34 per cent more likely to undergo the cancer screening procedure compared to women who were referred to a hospital or doctor's office, according to a new study by Women's College Hospital's Dr. Sheila Dunn. Although colposcopy is an important component of cervical cancer screening, some women, particularly those who are disadvantaged, fail to attend colposcopy appointments. However, researchers in the study, published today in the Journal ...

Mayo Clinic: Preclinical tests may lead to new approach to treat CNS lymphoma

2013-08-12
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- A drug recently approved for use in multiple myeloma is now being tested for its ability to fight central nervous system (CNS) lymphoma, a deadly cancer of the immune system that can affect the brain, spinal cord and fluid, and eyes. The clinical trial, now open at the three campuses of Mayo Clinic -- in Florida, Minnesota and Arizona -- follows successful testing of the drug, pomalidomide, in mouse models of CNS lymphoma. Details of the preclinical testing are available in the science journal PLOS ONE. Approximately 5,000 patients are diagnosed ...

Communicating nightingales: Older males trill better

2013-08-12
Older male nightingales perform faster and more demanding trills than their younger rivals. These findings were published by researchers at the University of Basel and the Netherlands Institute of Ecology in the online edition of Journal of Avian Biology. With up to 100 trill elements a second, nightingales belong to the fastest singers. Nightingales are famous for their large song repertoire: Each male can perform around 200 different song types. Facing this great variety, how can a female listener assess correctly if the male counterpart is a suitable mating partner? ...

Competition changes how people view strangers online

2013-08-12
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- An anonymous stranger you encounter on websites like Yelp or Amazon may seem to be just like you, and a potential friend. But a stranger on a site like eBay is a whole different story. A new study finds that on websites where people compete against each other, assumptions about strangers change. Previous research has shown that people have a bias toward thinking that strangers they encounter online are probably just like them. But when they are competitors, strangers are seen as different, and not sharing your traits and values -- and that changes ...

New materials for bio-based hydrogen synthesis

2013-08-12
Researchers at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have discovered an efficient process for hydrogen biocatalysis. They developed semi-synthetic hydrogenases, hydrogen-generating enzymes, by adding the protein's biological precursor to a chemically synthesized inactive iron complex. From these two components, the biological catalyst formed spontaneously in a test tube. "Extracting hydrogenases from living cells is highly difficult," says Prof Dr Thomas Happe, head of the work group Photobiotechnology at the RUB. "Therefore, their industrial application has always been a long ...

Simulating flow from volcanoes and oil spills

2013-08-12
WASHINGTON D.C. August 12, 2013 -- Some time around 37,000 BCE a massive volcano erupted in the Campanian region of Italy, blanketing much of Europe with ash, stunting plant growth and possibly dooming the Neanderthals. While our prehistoric relatives had no way to know the ash cloud was coming, a recent study provides a new tool that may have predicted what path volcanic debris would take. "This paper provides a model for the pattern of the ash cloud if the wind is blowing past an eruption of a given size," said Peter Baines, a scientist at the University of Melbourne ...

Scientists develop method that ensures safe research on deadly flu viruses

2013-08-12
A new strategy that dismantles a viral genome in human lung cells will ensure safe research on deadly strains of influenza, say researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Details of their "molecular biocontainment" approach, designed to prevent effective transmission of these viruses to humans, are published in Nature Biotechnology. The strategy they developed and tested will enable healthy molecules in human lung cells to latch on to these viruses and cut the bugs up before they have a chance to infect the human host. Findings from the study, ...

Expert: Taxation of retirement income in need of reform

2013-08-12
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Although planning for a comfortable retirement is a mainstay of public discussion, far less attention has been paid to the tax consequences of generating retirement income, says a University of Illinois expert on taxation and retirement benefits. According to law professor Richard L. Kaplan, the income tax consequences for retirees are varied, outdated or often outright inappropriate. "Legal and financial analyses abound regarding the various means of saving for retirement and the tax advantages that each option presents, but very few people consider ...

New insights into neuroblastoma tumor suppressor may provide clues for improved treatment

2013-08-12
August 12, 2013, New York, NY – Loss of a gene required for stem cells in the brain to turn into neurons may underlie the most severe forms of neuroblastoma, a deadly childhood cancer of the nervous system, according to a Ludwig Cancer Research study. Published in Developmental Cell today, the findings also provide clues about how to improve the treatment of this often-incurable tumor. Neuroblastoma can appear in nervous tissue in the abdomen, chest and spine, among other regions of the body, and can spawn body-wracking metastasis. The most severe tumors respond poorly ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Are lifetimes of big appliances really shrinking?

Pink skies

Monkeys are world’s best yodellers - new research

Key differences between visual- and memory-led Alzheimer’s discovered

% weight loss targets in obesity management – is this the wrong objective?

An app can change how you see yourself at work

NYC speed cameras take six months to change driver behavior, effects vary by neighborhood, new study reveals

New research shows that propaganda is on the rise in China

Even the richest Americans face shorter lifespans than their European counterparts, study finds

Novel genes linked to rare childhood diarrhea

New computer model reveals how Bronze Age Scandinavians could have crossed the sea

Novel point-of-care technology delivers accurate HIV results in minutes

Researchers reveal key brain differences to explain why Ritalin helps improve focus in some more than others

Study finds nearly five-fold increase in hospitalizations for common cause of stroke

Study reveals how alcohol abuse damages cognition

Medicinal cannabis is linked to long-term benefits in health-related quality of life

Microplastics detected in cat placentas and fetuses during early pregnancy

Ancient amphibians as big as alligators died in mass mortality event in Triassic Wyoming

Scientists uncover the first clear evidence of air sacs in the fossilized bones of alvarezsaurian dinosaurs: the "hollow bones" which help modern day birds to fly

Alcohol makes male flies sexy

TB patients globally often incur "catastrophic costs" of up to $11,329 USD, despite many countries offering free treatment, with predominant drivers of cost being hospitalization and loss of income

Study links teen girls’ screen time to sleep disruptions and depression

Scientists unveil starfish-inspired wearable tech for heart monitoring

Footprints reveal prehistoric Scottish lagoons were stomping grounds for giant Jurassic dinosaurs

AI effectively predicts dementia risk in American Indian/Alaska Native elders

First guideline on newborn screening for cystic fibrosis calls for changes in practice to improve outcomes

Existing international law can help secure peace and security in outer space, study shows

Pinning down the process of West Nile virus transmission

UTA-backed research tackles health challenges across ages

In pancreatic cancer, a race against time

[Press-News.org] Carnegie Mellon researchers say readers' identities can reveal much about content of articles
Applications include improved recommendation systems