Dynamic Topic-Based Sentiment Analysis of Large-Scale Online News

Many of today's online news websites and aggregator apps have enabled users to publish their opinions without respect to time and place. Existing works on topic-based sentiment analysis of product reviews cannot be applied to online news directly because of the following two reasons: (1) The dynamic nature of news streams require the topic and sentiment analysis model also to be dynamically updated. (2) The user interactions among news comments can easily lead to inaccurate topic and sentiment extraction. In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic generative model (DTSA) to extract topics and the specified sentiments from news streams and analyze their evolution over time simultaneously. DTSA incorporates a multiple timescale model into a generative topic model. Additionally, we further consider the links among news comments to avoid the error caused by user interactions. Finally, we derive distributed online inference procedures to update the model with newly arrived data and show the effectiveness of our proposed model on real-world data sets.