Abstract

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
News articles typically include reporting events to inform on what happened. These reporting events are not part of the story being told but are nonetheless a relevant part of the news and can pose a challenge to the computational processing of news narratives. They compose a reporting narrative, which is the present study's focus. This paper aims to demonstrate through selected use cases how a comprehensive annotation scheme with suitable tags and links can properly represent the reporting events and the way they relate to the events that make the story. In addition, we put forward a proposal for their visual representation that enables a systematic and detailed analysis of the importance of reporting events in the news structure. Finally, we describe some lexico-grammatical features of reporting events, which can contribute to their automatic detection. © 2023 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Abstract
Visual representations have the potential to improve information understanding. We explore this idea in the development of NewsLine, an open-source web-based prototype that focuses on narrative visualizations of news content. Having structured data as input, the prototype produces a storyline which showcases the narrative's events and participants, allowing the user to interact with the visualization in a number of ways. We built an information hub around the storyline to allow for multiple levels of exploration, specifically the main visualization, the event information module, and the sidebar. The visualization depicts the sequence of events that make up a news story, as well as the interactions between the involved parties in each event. The event information module presents additional information on a particular event. The sidebar is the “control center” of the visualization, unlocking a number of interactions and configurations. The prototype was evaluated with a user study with journalists and also with an online survey which gathered feedback from 178 potential end users. From these, 106 participants (60.6%) provided a rating of four or above (one to five scale) when asked to quantify their interest in using the application. Moreover, participants were asked to rank the importance of the visualization elements used. The results highlight that two elements stand out as the most important, the events and the entities. Overall, the participants generally found the application to be useful, but in need of some work in order for it to be made available to a broader public. © 2023 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).