Extracting concerns and reports on crimes in blogs

Abstract

Among other domains and topics on which some issues are frequently argued in the blogosphere, the domain of crime is one of the most seriously discussed by various kinds of bloggers. Such information on crimes in blogs is especially valuable for those who are not familiar with tips for preventing being victimized. This paper proposes a framework of extracting people's concerns and reports on crimes in their own blogs. In this framework, we solve two tasks. In the first task, we focus on experts in crime domain and address the issue of extracting concerns on crimes such as tips for preventing being victimized. In the evaluation of this first task, we show that we successfully rank expert bloggers high in the results of blog feed retrieval. In the second task, on the other hand, we focus on victims of criminal acts, and address the issue of extracting reports on being victimized. In the evaluation of this second task, we show that we outperform blog post ranking based on the search engine API by incorporating dependency relations for identifying victims' blog posts. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.