Extracting Socioeconomic Patterns from the News: Modelling Text and Outlet Importance Jointly

Vasileios Lampos, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, Sina Samangooei, Douwe Gelling, Trevor Cohn

Abstract: Information from news articles can be used to study correlations between textual discourse and socioeconomic patterns. This work focuses on the task of understanding how words contained in the news as well as the news outlets themselves may relate to a set of indicators, such as economic sentiment or unemployment rates. The bilinear nature of the applied regression model facilitates learning jointly word and outlet importance, supervised by these indicators. By evaluating the predictive ability of the extracted features, we can also assess their relevance to the target socioeconomic phenomena. Therefore, our approach can be formulated as a potential NLP tool, particularly suitable to the computational social science community, as it can be used to interpret connections between vast amounts of textual content and measurable societydriven factors.