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Cunningham, Pádraig
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Cunningham, Pádraig
Official Name
Cunningham, Pádraig
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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
- PublicationAdaptive Representations for Tracking Breaking News on Twitter(2014-08-27)
; ; Twitter is often the most up-to-date source for finding and tracking breaking news stories. Therefore, there is considerable interest in developing filters for tweet streams in order to track and summarize stories. This is a non-trivial text analytics task as tweets are short,and standard text similarity metrics often fail as stories evolve over time. In this paper we examine the effectiveness of adaptive text similarity mechanisms for tracking and summarizing breaking news stories. We evaluate the effectiveness of these mechanisms on a number of recent news events for which manually curated timelines are available. Assessments based on the ROUGE metric indicate that an adaptive similarity mechanism is best suited for tracking evolving stories on Twitter.170 - PublicationAnalyzing Discourse Communities with Distributional Semantic ModelsThis paper presents a new corpus-driven approach applicable to the study of language patterns in social and political contexts, or Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) using Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs). This approach considers changes in word semantics, both over time and between communities with differing viewpoints. The geometrical spaces constructed by DSMs or 'word spaces' offer an objective, robust exploratory analysis tool for revealing novel patterns and similarities between communities, as well as highlighting when these changes occur. To quantify differences between word spaces built on different time periods and from different communities, we analyze the nearest neighboring words in the DSM, a process we relate to analyzing 'concordance lines'. This makes the approach intuitive and interpretable to practitioners. We demonstrate the usefulness of the approach with two case studies, following groups with opposing political ideologies in the Scottish Independence Referendum, and the US Midterm Elections 2014.
1448Scopus© Citations 17 - PublicationReal time event monitoring with trident(2013-09-23)
; ; ; Building a scalable, fault-tolerant stream mining system that deals with realistic data volumes presents unique challenges. Considerable work is being done to make the development of such systems simpler, creating high level abstractions on top of existing systems. Many of the technical barriers can be eliminated by adopting a state-of-the-art interface, such as the Trident API for Storm. We describe a stream mining tool, based on Trident, for monitoring breaking news events on Twitter, which can be extended quickly and scaled easily.452 - PublicationDimensionality Reduction and Visualisation Tools for Voting Record(CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2016-09-21)
; ; ; Recorded votes in legislative bodies are an important source of data for political scientists. Voting records can be used to describe parliamentary processes, identify ideological divides between members and reveal the strength of party cohesion. We explore the problem of working with vote data using popular dimensionality reduction techniques and cluster validation methods, as an alternative to more traditional scaling techniques. We present results of dimensionality reduction techniques applied to votes from the 6th and 7th European Parliaments, covering activity from 2004 to 2014.280 - PublicationDetecting Attention Dominating Moments Across Media TypesIn this paper we address the problem of identifying attention dominating moments in online media. We are interested in discovering moments when everyone seems to be talking about the same thing. We investigate one particular aspect of breaking news: the tendency of multiple sources to concentrate attention on a single topic, leading to a collapse in diversity of content for a period of time. In this work we show that diversity at a topic level is effective for capturing this effect in blogs, in news articles, and on Twitter. The phenomenon is present in three distinctly different media types, each with their own unique features. We describe the phenomenon using case studies relating to major news stories from September 2015.
184 - PublicationA system for twitter user list curationWith increased adoption of social networking tools, it is becoming more difficult to extract useful information from the mass of data generated daily by users. Curation of content and sources is an important filter in separating the signal from noise. A good set of credible sources often requires painstaking manual curation, which often yields incomplete coverage of a topic. In this demo, we present a recommender system to aid this process, improving the quality and quantity of sources. The system is highly-adaptable to the goals of the curator, enabling some novel uses for curating and monitoring lists of users.
176Scopus© Citations 2