Bringing Citizens’ Opinions to Members of Parliament - The Newspaper Story
Ruxandra Geana, Stephen Taylor, Timo Wandhoefer · ePrints Soton (University of Southampton) · 2012
This paper describes a method whereby a governmental policy maker can discover where policy statements are discussed, and we show some example results for a case study validating our approach. Our basic strategy is to find news articles pertaining to the policy statements, then perform internet searches for references to the news articles’ headlines and URLs. We have created a software tool that schedules repeating Google searches for the news articles and collects the results in a database, enabling the user to aggregate and analyse them to produce ranked tables of sites that reference the news articles. Using data mining techniques we can group data so that result reflects an overall aggregate score, taking into account multiple datasets, averaging out individual differences, or we can examine the differences between datasets, for example how the sites where the article is discussed changes over time.