Predicting the Future Impact of News Events.

The amount of news content on the Web is increasing, enabling users to access news articles coming from a variety of sources: from newswires, news agencies, blogs, and at various places, e.g. even within Web search engines result pages. Anyhow, it still is a challenge for current search engines to decide which news events are worth being shown to the user (either for a newsworthy query or in a news portal). In this paper we define the task of predicting the future impact of news events. Being able to predict event impact will, for example, enable a newspaper to decide whether to follow a specific event or not, or a news search engine which stories to display. We define a flexible framework that, given some definition of impact, can predict its future development at the beginning of the event. We evaluate several possible definitions of event impact and experimentally identify the best features for each of them.