CLIFF-CLAVIN: Determining Geographic Focus for News Articles

Abstract

The growing diversity of news sources available online has led to a signi cant methodological change in eld of global news coverage. Studies of media attention and framing require sophisticated analytic tools to permit analysis of a large volume of content consumed by a broad readership. Geographic focus continues to be a topic of interest to media organizations, media analysts, and media consumers. De- tecting and recognizing geographic locations (toponyms) in news media is a well-established eld with many commercial and open source tools available. An evaluation is performed of various existing tools to compare their accuracy and appropriateness for use within media organizations and for media analysis. The concept of focus, indicating the location an article is primarily about, is extended into the news realm and added to an existing tool to increase relevance for the aforementioned applications. Potential applications as well as initial experiments using geoparsing for news organizations are discussed, in addition to ideas for future work building on these tools.