Finding your way through blogspace: Using semantics for cross-domain blog analysis
Bettina Berendt, Roberto Navigli · 2006
Blogspace is one of the most dynamic areas of today’s Internet, and it is increasingly recognised that blogs are much more than “meaningless chatter”. Many syntax-based approaches exist to analyse the text and the net-work structure between blogs. While this is very helpful for purposes such as the detection of discussion bursts concerning uniquely-named topics (e.g., a book, prod-uct, or person), it is insufficient for understanding blogs discussing new phenomena in different wordings, or for finding and explaining relationships between new dis-course topics or the context of a new topic in a larger domain of discourse. In this paper, we propose two methods for semantics-enhanced blogs analysis that al-low the analyst to integrate domain-specific as well as general background knowledge. The methods rely on the Term Extractor for identifying keyphrases (Navigli & Velardi, 2004), SSI (Structural Semantic Intercon-nections) for disambiguating terms (Navigli & Velardi, 2005), and the taxonomy of domain labels by (Magnini & Cavaglià, 2000). Applications include topic detection and grouping, the proposal of blog tags and the forming of blog directories, and blog recommender systems. To illustrate the usefulness of our approach, we present a detailed experimental analysis of a sample of four sets of blogs with different thematic foci (food, health, law, and weblogs about blogging).