Dunja Mladenic

Abdul Sittar, Dunja Mladenic

We present a methodology to support the analysis of culture from text such as news events and demonstrate its usefulness on categorizing news events from different categories (society, business, health, recreation, science, shopping, sports, arts, computers, games and home) across different geographical locations (different places in 117 countries). We group countries based on the culture that they follow and then filter the news events based on their content category. The news events are automatically labelled with the help of Hofstedes cultural dimensions. We present combinations of events across different categories and check the performances of different classification methods. We also presents experimental comparison of different number of features in order to find a suitable set to represent the culture.

Abdul Sittar, Dunja Mladenic, Marko Grobelnik

News media is one of the most effective mechanisms for spreading information internationally, and many events from different areas are internationally relevant. However, news coverage for some news events is limited to a specific geographical region because of information spreading barriers, which can be political, geographical, economic, cultural, or linguistic. In this paper, we propose an approach to barrier classification where we infer the semantics of news articles through Wikipedia concepts. To that end, we collected news articles and annotated them for different kinds of barriers using the metadata of news publishers. Then, we utilize the Wikipedia concepts along with the body text of news articles as features to infer the news-spreading barriers. We compare our approach to the classical text classification methods, deep learning, and transformer-based methods. The results show that the proposed approach using Wikipedia concepts based semantic knowledge offers better performance than the usual for classifying the news-spreading barriers.

Abdul Sittar, Dunja Mladenic, Marko Grobelnik

News headlines can be a good data source for detecting the news spreading barriers in news media, which may be useful in many real-world applications. In this paper, we utilize semantic knowledge through the inference-based model COMET and sentiments of news headlines for barrier classification. We consider five barriers including cultural, economic, political, linguistic, and geographical, and different types of news headlines including health, sports, science, recreation, games, homes, society, shopping, computers, and business. To that end, we collect and label the news headlines automatically for the barriers using the metadata of news publishers. Then, we utilize the extracted commonsense inferences and sentiments as features to detect the news spreading barriers. We compare our approach to the classical text classification methods, deep learning, and transformer-based methods. The results show that the proposed approach using inferences-based semantic knowledge and sentiment offers better performance than the usual (the average F1-score of the ten categories improves from 0.41, 0.39, 0.59, and 0.59 to 0.47, 0.55, 0.70, and 0.76 for the cultural, economic, political, and geographical respectively) for classifying the news-spreading barriers.

Abdul Sittar, Dunja Mladenic

Detection of news propagation barriers, being economical, cultural, political, time zonal, or geographical, is still an open research issue. We present an approach to barrier detection in news spreading by utilizing Wikipedia-concepts and metadata associated with each barrier. Solving this problem can not only convey the information about the coverage of an event but it can also show whether an event has been able to cross a specific barrier or not. Experimental results on IPoNews dataset (dataset for information spreading over the news) reveals that simple classification models are able to detect barriers with high accuracy. We believe that our approach can serve to provide useful insights which pave the way for the future development of a system for predicting information spreading barriers over the news.

Abdul Sittar, Dunja Mladenic, Alenka Gucek et al.

This paper presents BAR-Analytics, a web-based, open-source platform designed to analyze news dissemination across geographical, economic, political, and cultural boundaries. Using the Russian-Ukrainian and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts as case studies, the platform integrates four analytical methods: propagation analysis, trend analysis, sentiment analysis, and temporal topic modeling. Over 350,000 articles were collected and analyzed, with a focus on economic disparities and geographical influences using metadata enrichment. We evaluate the case studies using coherence, sentiment polarity, topic frequency, and trend shifts as key metrics. Our results show distinct patterns in news coverage: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict tends to have more negative sentiment with a focus on human rights, while the Russia-Ukraine conflict is more positive, emphasizing election interference. These findings highlight the influence of political, economic, and regional factors in shaping media narratives across different conflicts.