Because the volume of information available online is growing at breakneck speed, keeping up with meaning and information communicated by the media and netizens is a new challenge both for scholars and for companies who must address public relations crises. Most current theories and tools are directed at identifying one website or one piece of online news and do not attempt to develop a rapid understanding of all websites and all news covering one topic. This paper represents an effort to integrate statistics, word segmentation, complex networks and visualization to analyze headlines’ keywords and words relationships in online Chinese news using two samples: the 2011 Bohai Bay oil spill and the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. We gathered all the news headlines concerning the two trending events in the search results from Baidu, the most popular Chinese search engine. We used Simple Chinese Word Segmentation to segment all the headlines into words and then took words as nodes and considered adjacent relations as edges to construct word networks both using the whole sample and at the monthly level. Finally, we develop an integrated mechanism to analyze the features of words’ networks based on news headlines that can account for all the keywords in the news about a particular event and therefore track the evolution of news deeply and rapidly.
School of Humanities and Economic Management, China University of Geosciences, Beijing, China;Key Laboratory of Carrying Capacity Assessment for Resource and Environment, Ministry of Land and Resources, Beijing, China;Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, United States of America;Lab of Resources and Environmental Management, China University of Geosciences, Beijing, China;School of Humanities and Economic Management, China University of Geosciences, Beijing, China;Key Laboratory of Carrying Capacity Assessment for Resource and Environment, Ministry of Land and Resources, Beijing, China;Lab of Resources and Environmental Management, China University of Geosciences, Beijing, China;School of Humanities and Economic Management, China University of Geosciences, Beijing, China;Key Laboratory of Carrying Capacity Assessment for Resource and Environment, Ministry of Land and Resources, Beijing, China;Lab of Resources and Environmental Management, China University of Geosciences, Beijing, China;School of Humanities and Economic Management, China University of Geosciences, Beijing, China;Key Laboratory of Carrying Capacity Assessment for Resource and Environment, Ministry of Land and Resources, Beijing, China;Lab of Resources and Environmental Management, China University of Geosciences, Beijing, China
Recommended Citation:
Huajiao Li,Wei Fang,Haizhong An,et al. Words Analysis of Online Chinese News Headlines about Trending Events: A Complex Network Perspective[J]. PLOS ONE,2015-01-01,10(3)