Many news outlets allow users to contribute comments on topics about daily world events. News articles are the seeds that spring users' interest to contribute content, i.e., comments. An article may attract an apathetic user engagement (several tens of comments) or a spontaneous fervent user engagement (thousands of comments). This environment creates a social dynamic that is little studied. The social dynamics around articles have the potential to reveal interesting facets of the user population at a news outlet. We report some salient finding about these social media based on data collected from 17 news outlets. Analysis of the data reveals interesting insights such as there is an uneven relationship between news outlets and their user populations across outlets. Such observations and others have not been revealed, to our knowledge. Besides, we also study the problem of predicting the total number of user comments a news article will receive. Our main insight is that the early dynamics of user comments contribute the most to an accurate prediction, while news article specific factors have surprisingly little influence. We show that the early arrival rate of comments is the best indicator of the eventual number of comments. We conduct an in-depth analysis of this feature across several dimensions, such as news outlets and news article categories. Online comments submitted by readers of news articles can provide valuable feedback and critique, personal views and perspectives, and opportunities for discussion. Previously, we manually collect user comments from 17 news outlets for data analysis. However, this kind of manual solution is very limited and cannot work for variety of websites. Therefore, we need to have an automatic solution for thousands of news outlets. We find that most new websites employ third party commenting systems to create and manage their comment sections. One can crawl the comments by sending URL requests to those commenting system servers. We propose an approach of crawling user comments by instantiating URL templates supported by these web servers. We propose a hybrid framework that combines the advantages of labeling functions, in the form of regular expressions, and deep learning. We conduct extensive experiments with thousands of web pages to show that we can crawl comments from many websites with our approach. / Computer and Information Science

Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-10T16:21:13Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 jaqueline_melchior.pdf: 2135836 bytes, checksum: 3df5227d5df871fbed233c7a160f10b0 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-08-07 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / In this work, we present research conducted with the aim of drafting a proposal for theoretical application on teaching modality for students in 9th grade of elementary school. It is reported applying didactic proposal in a public school in the urban area of the city of Cascavel, Paraná, in the years 2013 and 2014. We started from the hypothesis that the 9th grade of elementary school students had a low argumentative competence in written production situations, to position themselves in relation to a controversial issue. The didactic proposal based on Cervoni (1989), Koch (2011), Castilho and Castilho (1993) and Neves s (1996) studies was applied, authors who served for the understanding that linguistic elements such as conjunctions, adverbs, adjectives etc., serve to build the arguments in texts. It was considered that the modalization is a semantic-discursive strategy possible in different textual / discursive genres, capable of allowing to the enunciator the record, in his speech, marks its subjectivity or objectivity by choosing linguistic elements that constitute an act of particular speech. The corpus chosen for analysis consists of four texts made by the students from a school s contentious issue that involved the choice of officials students school by an online voting. We expose methodology used in the didactic proposal and analysis of results checked in the online comment genre produced on a group in the social network Facebook. This work enabled realize that teaching the use of modalization for elementary school students is a possible practice associated with the production of online comment genre promotes interaction and possibility of new technologies integration in the learning process. We expect to contribute to the educational process of using modalization, not as an isolated content, but as a phenomenon present in human language, which must be associated with learning to read and write. / Este trabalho apresenta pesquisa realizada com objetivo de elaborar proposta de aplicação teórica sobre o ensino da modalização para alunos do 9º ano do ensino fundamental. Relata-se aplicação de proposta didática em escola pública da zona urbana da cidade de Cascavel, Estado do Paraná, nos anos de 2013 e 2014. Partiuse da hipótese de que os alunos daquele 9º ano do ensino fundamental possuíam uma baixa competência argumentativa em situações de produção escrita, ao se posicionarem em relação a uma questão polêmica. Aplicou-se proposta didática com base nos estudos de Cervoni (1989), Koch (2011), Castilho e Castilho (1993) e Neves (1996), autores que serviram para o entendimento de que elementos linguísticos, tais como conjunções, advérbios, adjetivos, etc, servem para a construção da argumentação do texto. Considerou-se que a modalização é uma estratégia semântico-discursiva possível em diferentes gêneros textuais/discursivos, capaz de permitir ao enunciador deixar registrado, em seu discurso, marcas de sua subjetividade ou objetividade por meio da escolha de elementos linguísticos que constituem um ato de fala particular. O corpus escolhido para análise é constituído de quatro textos produzidos pelos alunos a partir de uma situação polêmica na escola, que envolvia a escolha dos representantes do colégio por meio de uma votação on-line. Expõe-se metodologia utilizada na proposta didática e análise dos resultados visualizados em produções do gênero comentário on-line, em grupo criado na rede social Facebook. Este trabalho possibilitou perceber que o ensino do uso da modalização para alunos do ensino fundamental é uma prática possível que, associada à produção do gênero comentário on-line, promove interação e possibilidade de inserção das novas tecnologias no processo de aprendizagem. Espera-se contribuir com o processo de ensino do uso da modalização, não como um conteúdo isolado, mas como um fenômeno presente na linguagem humana, que deve ser associado à aprendizagem da leitura e escrita.