Category Archives: Fall 2013

Assignment 2: Filter Design

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For this assignment you will design a hybrid filtering algorithm. You will not implement it, but you will explain your design criteria and provide a filtering algorithm in sufficient technical detail to convince me that it might actually work — including psuedocode.

1. Decide who your users are. Journalists? Professionals? General consumers? Someone else?

2. Decide what you will filter. You can choose:

  • Facebook status updates, like the Facebook news feed
  • Tweets, like Trending Topics or the many Tweet discovery tools
  • The whole web, like Prismatic
  • something else, but ask me first

3. List all available information that you have available as input to your algorithm. If you want to filter Facebook or Twitter, you may pretend that you are the company running the service, and have access to all posts and user data — from every user. You also also assume you have a web crawler or a firehose of every RSS feed or whatever you like, but you must be specific and realistic about what data you are operating with.

4. Argue for the design factors that you would like to influence the filtering, in terms of what is desirable to the user, what is desirable to the publisher (e.g. Facebook or Prismatic), and what is desirable socially. Explain as concretely as possible how each of these (probably conflicting) goals might be achieved through in software. Since this is a hybrid filter, you can also design social software that asks the user for certain types of information (e.g. likes, votes, ratings) or encourages users to act in certain ways (e.g. following) that generate data for you.

5. Write psuedo-code for a function that produces a “top stories” list. This function will be called whenever the user loads your page or opens your app, so it must be fast and frequently updated. You can assume that there are background processes operating on your servers if you like. Your psuedo-code does not have to be executable, but it must be specific and unambiguous, such that a good programmer could actually go and implement it. You can assume that you have libraries for classic text analysis and machine learning algorithms. So, you don’t have to spell out algorithms like TF-IDF or item-based collaborative filtering, or anything else you can dig up in the research literature, but simply say how you’re going to use such building blocks. If you use an algorithm we haven’t discussed in class, be sure to provide a reference to it.

6. Write up steps 1-5. The result should be no more than three pages. However, you must be specific and plausible. You must be clear about what you are trying to accomplish, what your algorithm is, and why you believe your algorithm meets your design goals (though of course it’s impossible to know for sure without testing; but I want something that looks good enough to be worth trying.)

Due before class, October 9

 

Week 4: Social Filtering

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This week we looked how groups of people can act as information filters.

Slides.

First we studied Diakopolous’ SRSR (“seriously rapid source review”) system for finding sources on Twitter. There were a few clever bits of machine learning in there, for classifying source types (journalist/blogger, organization, or ordinary individual) and for identifying eyewitnesses. But mostly the system is useful because it presents many different “cues” to the journalist to help them determine whether a source is interesting and/or trustworthy. Useful, but when we look at how this fits into the broader process of social media sourcing — in particular how it fits into the Associated Press’ verification process — it’s clear that current software only adresses part of this complex process. This isn’t a machine learning problem, it’s a user interface and workflow design issue. (For more on social media verification practices, see for example the BBC’s “UGC hub“)

More broadly, journalism now involves users informing each other, and institutions or other authorities communicating directly. The model of journalism we looked at last week, which put reporters at the center of the loop, is simply wrong. A more complete picture includes users and institutions as publishers.

That horizontal arrow of institutions producing their own broadcast media is such a new part of the journalism ecosystem, and so disruptive, that the phenomenon has its own name: “sources go direct,” which seems to have been originally coined by blogging pioneer Dave Winer.

But this picture does not include filtering. There are thousands — no, millions — of sources we could tune into now, but we only direct attention to a narrow set of them, maybe including some journalists or news publications, but probably mostly other types of source, including some primary sources.

This is social filtering. By choosing who we follow, we determine what information reaches us. Twitter in particular does this very well, and we looked at how the Twitter network topology doesn’t look like a human social network, but is more tuned for news distribution.

There are no algorithms involved here… except of course for the code that lets people publish and share things. But the effect here isn’t primarily algorithmic. Instead, it’s about how people operate in groups. This gets us into  the concept of “social software,” which is a new interdisciplinary field with its own dynamics. We used the metaphor of “software as architecture,” suggested by Joel Spolsky, to think about how software influences behavior.

As an example of how environment influences behaviour, we watched this video which shows how to get people to take the stairs.

I argued that there are three forces which we can use to shape behavior in social software: norms, laws, and code. This implies that we have to write the code to be “anthropologically correct,” as Spolsky put it, but it also means that the code alone is not enough. This is something Spolsky observed as StackOverflow has become a network of Q&A sites on everything from statistics to cooking: each site has its own community and its own culture.

Previously we phrased the filter design problem in two ways: as a relevance function, and as a set of design criteria. When we use social filtering, there’s no relevance function deciding what we see. But we still have our design criteria, which tell us what type of filter we would like, and we can try to build systems that help people work together to produce this filtering. And along with this, we can imagine norms — habits, best practices, etiquette — that help this process along, an idea more thoroughly explored by Dan Gilmour in We The Media.

The readings from the syllabus were:

Required

Recommended

Week 3: Algorithmic Filtering

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Slides.

See also 2012 notes for this class.

This week we began our study of filtering with some basic ideas about its role in journalism. Then we shift gears to pure algorithmic approaches to filtering, with a  look at how the Newsblaster system works (similar to Google News.)

Required

Recommended

Viewed in class:

Assignment 1: TF-IDF

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In this assignment you will implement the TF-IDF formula and use it to study the topics in State of the Union speeches given every year by the U.S. president.

1. Download the source data file state-of-the-union.csv. This is a standard CSV file with one speech per row. There are two columns: the year of the speech, and the text of the speech. You will write a Python program that reads this file and turns it into TF-IDF document vectors, then prints out some information. Here is how to read a CSV in Python.

2. Tokenize the text each speech, to turn it into a list of words. As we discussed in class, we’re going to tokenize using a simple scheme:

  • convert all characters to lowercase
  • remove all punctuation characters
  • split the string on spaces

3. Compute a TF (term frequency) vector for each document. This is simply how many times each word appears in that document. You should end up with a Python dictionary from terms (strings) to term counts (numbers) for each document.

4. Count how many documents each word appears in. This can be done after computing how the TF vector by each document, by incrementing the document count of each word that appears in the TF vector. After reading all documents you should now have a dictionary from each term to the number of documents that term appears in.

5. Turn the final document counts into IDF (inverse document frequency) weights by applying the formula IDF(term) = log(total number of documents / number of documents that term appears in.)

6. Now multiply the TF vectors for each document by the IDF weights for each term, to produce TF-IDF vectors for each document. Then normalize each vector, so the sum of squared weights is 1.

7. Congratulations! You have a set of TF-IDF vectors for this corpus. Now it’s time to see what they say. Take the speech you were assigned in class, and print out the highest weighted 20 terms, along with their weights. What do you think this particular speech is about? Write your answer in at most 200 words.

8. Your task now is to see if you can understand how the topics changed since 1900. For each decade since 1900, do the following:

  • sum all of the TF-IDF vectors for all speeches in that decade
  • print out the top 20 terms in the summed vector, and their weights
Now take a look at the terms for each decade. What patterns do you see? Can you connect the terms to major historical events? (wars, the great depression, assassinations, the civil rights movement, Watergate…) Write up what you see in narrative form, no more than 500 words, referring to the terms for each decade.

9. Hand in by email, before class next week:

  • your code
  • the printout and analysis from step 7
  • the printout and narrative from step 8.

Week 2: Text Analysis

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 Slides.

Can we use machines to help us understand text? In this class we will cover basic text analysis techniques, from word counting to topic modeling. The algorithms we will discuss this week are used in just about everything: search engines, document set visualization, figuring out when two different articles are about the same story, finding trending topics. The vector space document model is fundamental to algorithmic handling of news content, and we will need it to understand how just about every filtering and personalization system works.

Required

  • Online Natural Language Processing Course, Stanford University
    • Week 7: Information Retrieval, Term-Document Incidence Matrix
    • Week 7: Ranked Information Retrieval, Introducing Ranked Retrieval
    • Week 7: Ranked Information Retrieval, Term Frequency Weighting
    • Week 7: Ranked Information Retrieval, Inverse Document Frequency Weighting
    • Week 7: Ranked Information Retrieval, TF-IDF weighting

Recommended

Examples

Assignment: TF-IDF analysis of State of the Union speeches.

Week 1: Basics

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Slides.

In this first week we ask: where do computer science and journalism intersect? CS techniques can help journalism in four different areas: data-driven reporting, story presentation, information filtering, and effect tracking.

Then we jumped right in with the concept of data. Specifically, we study feature vectors which are a fundamental data representation for many algorithms in data mining, language processing, machine learning, and visualization. This week we will explore two things: representing objects as vectors, and visualizing high dimensional spaces.

We also explored a principal components analysis of voting data from the UK House of Lords. The R file we ran to produce the output is here. A more sophisticated analysis, using custom distance metrics and multi-dimensional scaling, is here.

Readings:

Viewed in class

Syllabus – Fall 2013

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Aims of the course
The aim of the course is to familiarise students with current areas of research and development within computer science that have a direct relevance to the field of journalism. We are interested in producing both stories and software: we will study advanced techniques which can be used for individual acts of journalism, but we will also be studying the design of the software systems which inform us all.

Our scope is wide enough to include both relatively traditional journalistic work, such as computer-assisted investigative reporting, and the broader information systems that we all use every day to inform ourselves, such as search engines. The course will provide students with a thorough understanding of how particular fields of computational research relate to products being developed for journalism, and provoke ideas for their own research and projects.

Research-level computer science material will be discussed in class, but the emphasis will be on understanding the capabilities and limitations of this technology. Students with a CS background will have opportunity for algorithmic exploration and innovation, however the primary goal of the course is thoughtful, application-oriented research and design.

Assignments will be completed in groups and involve experimentation with fundamental computational techniques. There will be some coding, but the emphasis will be on thoughtful and critical analysis. As this is a journalism course, you will be expected to write clearly.

Format of the class, grading and assignments.
This is a fourteen week course for Masters’ students which has both a six point and a three point version. The six point version is designed for dual degree candidates in the journalism and computer science concentration, while the three point version is designed for those cross listing from other concentrations and schools.

The class is conducted in a seminar format. Assigned readings and computational techniques will form the basis of class discussion. Throughout the semester we will invite guest speakers with expertise in the relevant areas to talk about their related journalism, research, and product development

The course will be a graded as follows:

  • Assignments: 60%. There will be a homework assignment after most classes.
  • Class participation: 10%
  • Final project (for dual degree students only): 30%. This will be either a research paper, a computationally-driven story, or a software project.

The class is conducted on pass/fail basis for journalism students, in line with the journalism school’s grading system. Students from other departments will receive a letter grade.

Week 1. – Basics
First we ask: where do computer science and journalism intersect? CS techniques can help journalism in four different areas: data-driven reporting, story presentation, information filtering, and effect tracking. Then we jump right in with the concept of data. Specifically, we study feature vectors which are a fundamental data representation for many algorithms in data mining, language processing, machine learning, and visualization. This week we will explore two things: representing objects as vectors, and visualizing high dimensional spaces.

Required

Recommended

  • Precision Journalism, Ch.1, Journalism and the Scientific Tradition, Philip Meyer

Viewed in class

Lecture 2: Text Analysis
Can we use machines to help us understand text? In this class we will cover basic text analysis techniques, from word counting to topic modeling. The algorithms we will discuss this week are used in just about everything: search engines, document set visualization, figuring out when two different articles are about the same story, finding trending topics. The vector space document model is fundamental to algorithmic handling of news content, and we will need it to understand how just about every filtering and personalization system works.

Required

  • Online Natural Language Processing Course, Stanford University
    • Week 7: Information Retrieval, Term-Document Incidence Matrix
    • Week 7: Ranked Information Retrieval, Introducing Ranked Retrieval
    • Week 7: Ranked Information Retrieval, Term Frequency Weighting
    • Week 7: Ranked Information Retrieval, Inverse Document Frequency Weighting
    • Week 7: Ranked Information Retrieval, TF-IDF weighting

Recommended

Examples

Assignment: TF-IDF analysis of State of the Union speeches.

Week 3: Information overload and algorithmic filtering
This week we begin our study of filtering with some basic ideas about its role in journalism. Then we shift gears to pure algorithmic approaches to filtering, with a  look at how the Newsblaster system works (similar to Google News.)

Required

Recommended

Week 4: Social software and social filtering
We have now studied purely algorithmic modes of filtering, and this week we will bring in the social. First we’ll look at the entire concept of “social software,” which is a new interdisciplinary field with its own dynamics. We’ll use the metaphor of “architecture,” suggested by Joel Spolsky, to think about how software influences behaviour. Then we’ll study social media and its role in journalism, including its role in information distribution and collection, and emerging techniques to help find sources.

Required

Recommended

Week 5: Hybrid filters, recommendation, and conversation
We have now studied purely algorithmic and mostly social modes of filtering. This week we’re going to study systems that combine software and people. We’ll a look “recommendation” systems and the socially-driven algorithms behind them. Then we’ll turn to online discussions, and hybrid techniques for ensuring a “good conversation” — a social outcome with no single definition. We’ll finish by looking at an example of using human preferences to drive machine learning algorithms: Google Web search.

Required

Recommended

Assignment – Design a filtering algorithm for status updates.

Week 6: Visualization
An introduction into how visualisation helps people interpret  information. The difference between infographics and visualization, and between exploration and presentation. Design principles from user experience considerations, graphic design, and the study of the human visual system. Also, what is specific about visualization in journalism, as opposed to the many other fields that use it?

Required

Recommended

Week 7: Structured journalism and knowledge representation
Is journalism in the text/video/audio business, or is it in the knowledge business? This class we’ll look at this question in detail, which gets us deep into the issue of how knowledge is represented in a computer. The traditional relational database model is often inappropriate for journalistic work, so we’re going to concentrate on so-called “linked data” representations. Such representations are widely used and increasingly popular. For example Google recently released the Knowledge Graph. But generating this kind of data from unstructured text is still very tricky, as we’ll see when we look at th Reverb algorithm.

Required

Recommended

Assignment: Text enrichment experiments using OpenCalais entity extraction.

Week 8: Network analysis
Network analysis (aka social network analysis, link analysis) is a promising and popular technique for uncovering relationships between diverse individuals and organizations. It is widely used in intelligence and law enforcement, but not so much in journalism. We’ll look at basic techniques and algorithms and try to understand the promise — and the many practical problems.

Required

Recommended

Examples:

Assignment: Compare different centrality metrics in Gephi.

Week 9: Drawing conclusions from data
You’ve loaded up all the data. You’ve run the algorithms. You’ve completed your analysis. But how do you know that you are right? It’s incredibly easy to fool yourself, but fortunately, there is a long history of fields grappling with the problem of determining truth in the face of uncertainty, from statistics to intelligence analysis.

Required

  • Correlation and causation, Business Insider
  • The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, chapters 1,2,3 and 8. Richards J. Heuer

Recommended

Assignment: analyze gun ownership vs. gun violence data.

Week 10: Security, Surveillance, and Censorship
Who is watching our online activities? How do you protect a source in the 21st Century? Who gets to access to all of this mass intelligence, and what does the ability to survey everything all the time mean both practically and ethically for journalism? In this lecture we will talk about who is watching and how, and how to create a security plan using threat modeling.

Required

Recommended

Cryptographic security

Anonymity

Assignment: Use threat modeling to come up with a security plan for a given scenario.

Week 11: Tracking flow and impact
How does information flow in the online ecosystem? What happens to a story after it’s published? How do items spread through social networks? We’re just beginning to be able to track ideas as they move through the network, by combining techniques from social network analysis and bioinformatics.

Required

Recommended

Week 12 – Project review
We will spend this week discussing your final projects and figuring out the best approaches to your data and/or topic.