Automatic Extraction of News Values from Headline Text

Headlines play a crucial role in attracting audiences’ attention to online artefacts (e.g. news articles, videos, blogs). The ability to carry out an automatic, largescale analysis of headlines is critical to facilitate the selection and prioritisation of a large volume of digital content. In journalism studies news content has been extensively studied using manually annotated news values – factors used implicitly and explicitly when making decisions on the selection and prioritisation of news items. This paper presents the first attempt at a fully automatic extraction of news values from headline text. The news values extraction methods are applied on a large headlines corpus collected from The Guardian, and evaluated by comparing it with a manually annotated gold standard. A crowdsourcing survey indicates that news values affect people’s decisions to click on a headline, supporting the need for an automatic news values detection.