Friday, February 1, 2013

Researchers want to predict disasters by mining the New York Times archives

The New York Times HQ logo (1020)

Online news has made finding current events easier than ever — but what if it could be used to predict future events as well? Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research and Kira Radinsky of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have built a system that mines over 20 years of New York Times articles for events that could point to other, later developments. In their test model, Horvitz and Radinsky created a system to draw connections between events, then set it loose on the Times database.


The system was able to "learn" correlations between events by looking at sequences of stories in particular places: if an article was published about a drought in one place, for example, there was an 18 percent chance of a drought being reported there...


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via The Verge - All Posts http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/1/3941708/researchers-want-to-predict-disasters-by-mining-newspapers

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