Why does news language matter?

Each news category has its own vocabulary. Publishers chose words strategically to signal relevance, evoke emotion, or frame a narrative. But which words do publishers rely on most, and how do those words differ across categories?

This project analyzes 108,000 news headlines all from the first half of August 2020, and maps them into 1 vocabulary space, revealing how categories like Science, Business, Entertainment, Health, Sports, World Events, and National Events establish their own distinct linguistic territory.

This post contains a summary and interactive visualizations of the project. For the code and more in-depth explanations, please see my Github. Thank you!

From raw headlines to visualization

1. Text cleaning & preprocessing

Cleaned text by removing stopwords, URLs, punctuation, uppercase, and numeric characters using NLTK and regex.

2. Word frequency extraction per category

Combined all headlines per category and counted word frequencies. Words appearing fewer than 5 times were filtered to reduce noise.

3. Normalization & reference points

Normalize word frequency for each category to balance a dataset that’s biased to certain categories. Include each category word (“Science”, “Business”, etc) as reference points.

4. Dimensionality reduction & visualization

Compressed 10,000 word frequencies using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to 3 components, then plotted each word in a Plotly scatterplot.

Interactive Visualizations

Each blue point is a word that occurred 5+ times in the news title dataset. Its position shows how it relates to every category, which are the non-blue points. Its size reflects overall frequency.

• For example, you can think of the light red point at the top of the graph as the essense of the Sports news category. The words closeby like “arsenal” and “transfer” show that although they might be used in other news categories, they are used significantly more frequently in the Sports category. Words that are equidistant to 2 or more category points show that they are used about the same frequency between the categories. For example, “game” is equally between Sports and Technology.

Feel free to hover over points to see the represented word and frequency, use the icons on the top right of the graphs and drag to pan, rotate, or zoom, or click on the legend key to filter by color.

Observations

• There are not only relationships between the words and the categories, but also relationships between categories and other categories. Some categories live on the ends of the spectrum, while others significantly overlap. Health and World are the closest pair, while Entertainment and Sports are the farthest apart. (This is easier to notice in the 3D graph rather than the 2D.) In fact, Science, Health, World, and Nation are all clustered together, suggesting there are a lot of overlapping words between these categories. In the context of August 2020, that makes sense and is supported by the most frequent words within the cluster being “coronavirus” (5566 times), “vaccine” (1533), and “covid” (1397).

• Categories can be defined by the highest frequency words that are unique to the category.
  • Among the Sports-unique words, “league” (1214) and “transfer” (1068) have the highest frequencies.
  • Among the Entertainment-unique words, most words are under frequencies of 300. “prince” (443), “birthday” (386) and “meghan” (356) seem to be the only outliers. Prince Harry and Meghan announced moving to California in August 2020.
  • Among the Technology-unique words, “apple” (1206), “google” (1100), “galaxy” (950) have the highest frequencies. There are many other brand names too.
  • Among the Business-unique words, “market” (3435) has the highest frequency.
  • Among the Science-unique words, “nasa” (461) and “mars” (353) have the highest frequencies.
  • Among the Health-unique words, “us” (2369), “study”(1467), and “scientists” (743) have the highest frequencies. Because we removed punctuation in text cleaning, “us” could be referring to “us” and/or “U.S.”
  • Among the World-unique words, there aren’t really many words clustered around like other categories. The frequencies are mostly under 200. Perhaps World news covers such a broad scope of places and topics that there aren’t words solely used by this category.
  • Among the Nation-unique words, “police” (792) has the highest frequency. Although the police’s relation to Black Lives Matter is a significant topic in 2020 U.S. news, these events fall largely outside of the dataset’s scope, the first half of August 2020. This suggests that “police” is a ubiquitous topic across time and countries, maintaining steady coverage rather than a few monumental stories.
• There are a lot of proper nouns amongst these category-unique high frequency words, signifying that specificity matters. A news headline might reel the reader into the rest of the article by sharing the who and what, rather than the how and why.
  
  

What to Explore Further

• How does the vocabulary space change over time? If there were datasets that represent different months or years of news articles, we can see which words maintain their frequency and if there’s a shift in how they are associated to the categories.
• Instead of using words, use phrases of X-length of consecutive words. Finding the sweet spot for X might be a bit tricky, but it would provide a bit more context with how the words are being used and when using a threshold, filter out less common occurences. This could also strengthen our observation about proper nouns. It would reveal if “apple” refers to the fruit or the more likely Apple company.
• Flag words by their part of speech (verb, noun, adjective, etc.) This can be difficult with words that have ambiguous parts of speech, and might not be relevant since cleaning text can remove part of speech by simplifying into root words.
• Color code each word in graph to the closest category (classification).

Sources:

Dataset: Labelled News Articles