AI Community AI Community
Name: Towards AI Legal Name: Towards AI, Inc. Description: Towards AI is the world's leading artificial intelligence (AI) and technology publication. Read by thought-leaders and decision-makers around the world. Phone Number: +1-650-246-9381 Email: pub@towardsai.net
228 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10003 United States
Website: Publisher: https://towardsai.net/#publisher Diversity Policy: https://towardsai.net/about Ethics Policy: https://towardsai.net/about Masthead: https://towardsai.net/about
Name: Towards AI Legal Name: Towards AI, Inc. Description: Towards AI is the world's leading artificial intelligence (AI) and technology publication. Founders: Roberto Iriondo, , Job Title: Co-founder and Advisor Works for: Towards AI, Inc. Follow Roberto: X, LinkedIn, GitHub, Google Scholar, Towards AI Profile, Medium, ML@CMU, FreeCodeCamp, Crunchbase, Bloomberg, Roberto Iriondo, Generative AI Lab, Generative AI Lab Denis Piffaretti, Job Title: Co-founder Works for: Towards AI, Inc. Louie Peters, Job Title: Co-founder Works for: Towards AI, Inc. Louis-François Bouchard, Job Title: Co-founder Works for: Towards AI, Inc. Cover:
Towards AI Cover
Logo:
Towards AI Logo
Areas Served: Worldwide Alternate Name: Towards AI, Inc. Alternate Name: Towards AI Co. Alternate Name: towards ai Alternate Name: towardsai Alternate Name: towards.ai Alternate Name: tai Alternate Name: toward ai Alternate Name: toward.ai Alternate Name: Towards AI, Inc. Alternate Name: towardsai.net Alternate Name: pub.towardsai.net
5 stars – based on 497 reviews

Frequently Used, Contextual References

TODO: Remember to copy unique IDs whenever it needs used. i.e., URL: 304b2e42315e

Resources

Take our 85+ lesson From Beginner to Advanced LLM Developer Certification: From choosing a project to deploying a working product this is the most comprehensive and practical LLM course out there!

Publication

Combating Media Bias with AWS Amazon Comprehend
Latest   Machine Learning

Combating Media Bias with AWS Amazon Comprehend

ifttt-user
1 like
November 19, 2018
Share this post

Last Updated on July 25, 2023 by Editorial Team

Author(s): Bence L. Tóth

Originally published on Towards AI.

Combating Media Bias with NLP U+007C Towards AI

Photo by Randy Colas on Unsplash

In the world of fake news and ideology-driven subjective media coverage, it is questionable which sources of journalism can be considered “reliable”. It happens many times that two different news outlets share two completely different takes on the same story. “Experts” point out different consequences of events from the whole spectrum, mostly the ones that suit their own agenda.

In these times, it is important to identify the biases of different news organizations towards certain topics.

Can machine learning help to discover these biases?

AWS

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to find insights and relationships in text. (Source: aws.amazon.com).

Combining AWS Comprehend with the web scraping capabilities of the R language (rvest package), an analysis can be carried out, with two articles that are written on the same topic, from two news sites with supposedly different background ideologies.

Trump’s coverage

The topic is the evaluation of Donald Trump’s first 100 days as President of the United States. In American politics, actions that took place within the first hundred days after the election are often a good approximation of the overall route that the current president is willing to take in his/her term, therefore a highly covered topic from both the left and the right.

The first article on Trump’s first 100 days is from Breitbart News, what is considered to be an alt-right news agency with columnists such as Milo Yiannopoulous and former chairman of Breitbart and White House Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon.

The second article is from Buzzfeed, a considerably left-wing internet media company, funded by Jonah Peretti, the co-founder of The Huffington Post.

Parsing the HTML content of these articles with web scraping and a CSS selector, the raw text is available. After minor data cleaning, it is possible to run Amazon’s sentiment analysis on each paragraph of the articles. Each of these is assigned an overall sentiment of “Positive”, “Neutral”, or “Negative”, with extra data on the percentage of assuredness. Eg.: a 0.78 positive measure of a paragraph means that Comprehend is 78% sure that that paragraph has a positive sentiment.

The summary of the two articles can be seen below:

Statistics for sentiment analysis

We can see that Breitbart has more neutral statements than Buzzfeed, and has a higher mean of positive sentiments. On the other hand, it almost has the same negative sentiments, while Buzzfeed’s negative value is more than 3 times bigger than that of Breitbart.

The boxplot below illustrates the difference between negative sentiments:

Distribution of negative sentiments

The median of negative sentiments is a bit higher in Buzzfeed paragraphs, but non-substantially. It seems that there are some parts of the text which have a way higher certainty of negative tone which shifts the mean to be bigger in their article. This could mean that Breitbart’s takes on the worse parts of Trump’s first 100 days are not stated that harshly, while Buzzfeed uses strong words to emphasize their negative assessment of certain legislation.

Afterword

This analysis does not necessarily prove leniency towards the topic from either side as the sentiment analysis of AWS might be off for more sophisticated sentences, cannot understand sarcasm and furthermore, comparing two random articles of the same topic does not infer bias in an entire news agency. However, further analysis can be done with various topics and more similar articles to potentially infer something about certain sites’ stand on broader ideologies.

Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming a sponsor.

Published via Towards AI

, , , , ,
Share this post

Related posts

LAI #66: Information Theory for People in a Hurry
Artificial Intelligence, Latest, Machine Learning

LAI #66: Information Theory for People in a Hurry

Towards AI Editorial Team
0 like
WHAT IS MCP BY ANTHROPIC?(MODEL CONTEXT PROTOCOL)
Data Science, Latest, Machine Learning

WHAT IS MCP BY ANTHROPIC?(MODEL CONTEXT PROTOCOL)

Adarsh Menon
1 like
FactoryBERT: An AI That Understands Manufacturing
Data Science, Latest, Machine Learning

FactoryBERT: An AI That Understands Manufacturing

Saif Ali Kheraj
1 like
🔎 Decoding LLM Pipeline — Step 1: Input Processing & Tokenization
Artificial Intelligence, Latest, Machine Learning

🔎 Decoding LLM Pipeline — Step 1: Input Processing & Tokenization

Ecem Karaman
1 like

Feedback ↓

Sign Up for the Course
`; } else { console.error('Element with id="subscribe" not found within the page with class "home".'); } } }); // Remove duplicate text from articles /* Backup: 09/11/24 function removeDuplicateText() { const elements = document.querySelectorAll('h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, strong'); // Select the desired elements const seenTexts = new Set(); // A set to keep track of seen texts const tagCounters = {}; // Object to track instances of each tag elements.forEach(el => { const tagName = el.tagName.toLowerCase(); // Get the tag name (e.g., 'h1', 'h2', etc.) // Initialize a counter for each tag if not already done if (!tagCounters[tagName]) { tagCounters[tagName] = 0; } // Only process the first 10 elements of each tag type if (tagCounters[tagName] >= 2) { return; // Skip if the number of elements exceeds 10 } const text = el.textContent.trim(); // Get the text content const words = text.split(/\s+/); // Split the text into words if (words.length >= 4) { // Ensure at least 4 words const significantPart = words.slice(0, 5).join(' '); // Get first 5 words for matching // Check if the text (not the tag) has been seen before if (seenTexts.has(significantPart)) { // console.log('Duplicate found, removing:', el); // Log duplicate el.remove(); // Remove duplicate element } else { seenTexts.add(significantPart); // Add the text to the set } } tagCounters[tagName]++; // Increment the counter for this tag }); } removeDuplicateText(); */ // Remove duplicate text from articles function removeDuplicateText() { const elements = document.querySelectorAll('h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, strong'); // Select the desired elements const seenTexts = new Set(); // A set to keep track of seen texts const tagCounters = {}; // Object to track instances of each tag // List of classes to be excluded const excludedClasses = ['medium-author', 'post-widget-title']; elements.forEach(el => { // Skip elements with any of the excluded classes if (excludedClasses.some(cls => el.classList.contains(cls))) { return; // Skip this element if it has any of the excluded classes } const tagName = el.tagName.toLowerCase(); // Get the tag name (e.g., 'h1', 'h2', etc.) // Initialize a counter for each tag if not already done if (!tagCounters[tagName]) { tagCounters[tagName] = 0; } // Only process the first 10 elements of each tag type if (tagCounters[tagName] >= 10) { return; // Skip if the number of elements exceeds 10 } const text = el.textContent.trim(); // Get the text content const words = text.split(/\s+/); // Split the text into words if (words.length >= 4) { // Ensure at least 4 words const significantPart = words.slice(0, 5).join(' '); // Get first 5 words for matching // Check if the text (not the tag) has been seen before if (seenTexts.has(significantPart)) { // console.log('Duplicate found, removing:', el); // Log duplicate el.remove(); // Remove duplicate element } else { seenTexts.add(significantPart); // Add the text to the set } } tagCounters[tagName]++; // Increment the counter for this tag }); } removeDuplicateText(); //Remove unnecessary text in blog excerpts document.querySelectorAll('.blog p').forEach(function(paragraph) { // Replace the unwanted text pattern for each paragraph paragraph.innerHTML = paragraph.innerHTML .replace(/Author\(s\): [\w\s]+ Originally published on Towards AI\.?/g, '') // Removes 'Author(s): XYZ Originally published on Towards AI' .replace(/This member-only story is on us\. Upgrade to access all of Medium\./g, ''); // Removes 'This member-only story...' }); //Load ionic icons and cache them if ('localStorage' in window && window['localStorage'] !== null) { const cssLink = 'https://code.ionicframework.com/ionicons/2.0.1/css/ionicons.min.css'; const storedCss = localStorage.getItem('ionicons'); if (storedCss) { loadCSS(storedCss); } else { fetch(cssLink).then(response => response.text()).then(css => { localStorage.setItem('ionicons', css); loadCSS(css); }); } } function loadCSS(css) { const style = document.createElement('style'); style.innerHTML = css; document.head.appendChild(style); } //Remove elements from imported content automatically function removeStrongFromHeadings() { const elements = document.querySelectorAll('h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, span'); elements.forEach(el => { const strongTags = el.querySelectorAll('strong'); strongTags.forEach(strongTag => { while (strongTag.firstChild) { strongTag.parentNode.insertBefore(strongTag.firstChild, strongTag); } strongTag.remove(); }); }); } removeStrongFromHeadings(); "use strict"; window.onload = () => { /* //This is an object for each category of subjects and in that there are kewords and link to the keywods let keywordsAndLinks = { //you can add more categories and define their keywords and add a link ds: { keywords: [ //you can add more keywords here they are detected and replaced with achor tag automatically 'data science', 'Data science', 'Data Science', 'data Science', 'DATA SCIENCE', ], //we will replace the linktext with the keyword later on in the code //you can easily change links for each category here //(include class="ml-link" and linktext) link: 'linktext', }, ml: { keywords: [ //Add more keywords 'machine learning', 'Machine learning', 'Machine Learning', 'machine Learning', 'MACHINE LEARNING', ], //Change your article link (include class="ml-link" and linktext) link: 'linktext', }, ai: { keywords: [ 'artificial intelligence', 'Artificial intelligence', 'Artificial Intelligence', 'artificial Intelligence', 'ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE', ], //Change your article link (include class="ml-link" and linktext) link: 'linktext', }, nl: { keywords: [ 'NLP', 'nlp', 'natural language processing', 'Natural Language Processing', 'NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING', ], //Change your article link (include class="ml-link" and linktext) link: 'linktext', }, des: { keywords: [ 'data engineering services', 'Data Engineering Services', 'DATA ENGINEERING SERVICES', ], //Change your article link (include class="ml-link" and linktext) link: 'linktext', }, td: { keywords: [ 'training data', 'Training Data', 'training Data', 'TRAINING DATA', ], //Change your article link (include class="ml-link" and linktext) link: 'linktext', }, ias: { keywords: [ 'image annotation services', 'Image annotation services', 'image Annotation services', 'image annotation Services', 'Image Annotation Services', 'IMAGE ANNOTATION SERVICES', ], //Change your article link (include class="ml-link" and linktext) link: 'linktext', }, l: { keywords: [ 'labeling', 'labelling', ], //Change your article link (include class="ml-link" and linktext) link: 'linktext', }, pbp: { keywords: [ 'previous blog posts', 'previous blog post', 'latest', ], //Change your article link (include class="ml-link" and linktext) link: 'linktext', }, mlc: { keywords: [ 'machine learning course', 'machine learning class', ], //Change your article link (include class="ml-link" and linktext) link: 'linktext', }, }; //Articles to skip let articleIdsToSkip = ['post-2651', 'post-3414', 'post-3540']; //keyword with its related achortag is recieved here along with article id function searchAndReplace(keyword, anchorTag, articleId) { //selects the h3 h4 and p tags that are inside of the article let content = document.querySelector(`#${articleId} .entry-content`); //replaces the "linktext" in achor tag with the keyword that will be searched and replaced let newLink = anchorTag.replace('linktext', keyword); //regular expression to search keyword var re = new RegExp('(' + keyword + ')', 'g'); //this replaces the keywords in h3 h4 and p tags content with achor tag content.innerHTML = content.innerHTML.replace(re, newLink); } function articleFilter(keyword, anchorTag) { //gets all the articles var articles = document.querySelectorAll('article'); //if its zero or less then there are no articles if (articles.length > 0) { for (let x = 0; x < articles.length; x++) { //articles to skip is an array in which there are ids of articles which should not get effected //if the current article's id is also in that array then do not call search and replace with its data if (!articleIdsToSkip.includes(articles[x].id)) { //search and replace is called on articles which should get effected searchAndReplace(keyword, anchorTag, articles[x].id, key); } else { console.log( `Cannot replace the keywords in article with id ${articles[x].id}` ); } } } else { console.log('No articles found.'); } } let key; //not part of script, added for (key in keywordsAndLinks) { //key is the object in keywords and links object i.e ds, ml, ai for (let i = 0; i < keywordsAndLinks[key].keywords.length; i++) { //keywordsAndLinks[key].keywords is the array of keywords for key (ds, ml, ai) //keywordsAndLinks[key].keywords[i] is the keyword and keywordsAndLinks[key].link is the link //keyword and link is sent to searchreplace where it is then replaced using regular expression and replace function articleFilter( keywordsAndLinks[key].keywords[i], keywordsAndLinks[key].link ); } } function cleanLinks() { // (making smal functions is for DRY) this function gets the links and only keeps the first 2 and from the rest removes the anchor tag and replaces it with its text function removeLinks(links) { if (links.length > 1) { for (let i = 2; i < links.length; i++) { links[i].outerHTML = links[i].textContent; } } } //arrays which will contain all the achor tags found with the class (ds-link, ml-link, ailink) in each article inserted using search and replace let dslinks; let mllinks; let ailinks; let nllinks; let deslinks; let tdlinks; let iaslinks; let llinks; let pbplinks; let mlclinks; const content = document.querySelectorAll('article'); //all articles content.forEach((c) => { //to skip the articles with specific ids if (!articleIdsToSkip.includes(c.id)) { //getting all the anchor tags in each article one by one dslinks = document.querySelectorAll(`#${c.id} .entry-content a.ds-link`); mllinks = document.querySelectorAll(`#${c.id} .entry-content a.ml-link`); ailinks = document.querySelectorAll(`#${c.id} .entry-content a.ai-link`); nllinks = document.querySelectorAll(`#${c.id} .entry-content a.ntrl-link`); deslinks = document.querySelectorAll(`#${c.id} .entry-content a.des-link`); tdlinks = document.querySelectorAll(`#${c.id} .entry-content a.td-link`); iaslinks = document.querySelectorAll(`#${c.id} .entry-content a.ias-link`); mlclinks = document.querySelectorAll(`#${c.id} .entry-content a.mlc-link`); llinks = document.querySelectorAll(`#${c.id} .entry-content a.l-link`); pbplinks = document.querySelectorAll(`#${c.id} .entry-content a.pbp-link`); //sending the anchor tags list of each article one by one to remove extra anchor tags removeLinks(dslinks); removeLinks(mllinks); removeLinks(ailinks); removeLinks(nllinks); removeLinks(deslinks); removeLinks(tdlinks); removeLinks(iaslinks); removeLinks(mlclinks); removeLinks(llinks); removeLinks(pbplinks); } }); } //To remove extra achor tags of each category (ds, ml, ai) and only have 2 of each category per article cleanLinks(); */ //Recommended Articles var ctaLinks = [ /* ' ' + '

Subscribe to our AI newsletter!

' + */ '

Take our 85+ lesson From Beginner to Advanced LLM Developer Certification: From choosing a project to deploying a working product this is the most comprehensive and practical LLM course out there!

'+ '

Towards AI has published Building LLMs for Production—our 470+ page guide to mastering LLMs with practical projects and expert insights!

' + '
' + '' + '' + '

Note: Content contains the views of the contributing authors and not Towards AI.
Disclosure: This website may contain sponsored content and affiliate links.

' + 'Discover Your Dream AI Career at Towards AI Jobs' + '

Towards AI has built a jobs board tailored specifically to Machine Learning and Data Science Jobs and Skills. Our software searches for live AI jobs each hour, labels and categorises them and makes them easily searchable. Explore over 10,000 live jobs today with Towards AI Jobs!

' + '
' + '

🔥 Recommended Articles 🔥

' + 'Why Become an LLM Developer? Launching Towards AI’s New One-Stop Conversion Course'+ 'Testing Launchpad.sh: A Container-based GPU Cloud for Inference and Fine-tuning'+ 'The Top 13 AI-Powered CRM Platforms
' + 'Top 11 AI Call Center Software for 2024
' + 'Learn Prompting 101—Prompt Engineering Course
' + 'Explore Leading Cloud Providers for GPU-Powered LLM Training
' + 'Best AI Communities for Artificial Intelligence Enthusiasts
' + 'Best Workstations for Deep Learning
' + 'Best Laptops for Deep Learning
' + 'Best Machine Learning Books
' + 'Machine Learning Algorithms
' + 'Neural Networks Tutorial
' + 'Best Public Datasets for Machine Learning
' + 'Neural Network Types
' + 'NLP Tutorial
' + 'Best Data Science Books
' + 'Monte Carlo Simulation Tutorial
' + 'Recommender System Tutorial
' + 'Linear Algebra for Deep Learning Tutorial
' + 'Google Colab Introduction
' + 'Decision Trees in Machine Learning
' + 'Principal Component Analysis (PCA) Tutorial
' + 'Linear Regression from Zero to Hero
'+ '
', /* + '

Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. It’s free, we don’t spam, and we never share your email address. Keep up to date with the latest work in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming a sponsor.

',*/ ]; var replaceText = { '': '', '': '', '
': '
' + ctaLinks + '
', }; Object.keys(replaceText).forEach((txtorig) => { //txtorig is the key in replacetext object const txtnew = replaceText[txtorig]; //txtnew is the value of the key in replacetext object let entryFooter = document.querySelector('article .entry-footer'); if (document.querySelectorAll('.single-post').length > 0) { //console.log('Article found.'); const text = entryFooter.innerHTML; entryFooter.innerHTML = text.replace(txtorig, txtnew); } else { // console.log('Article not found.'); //removing comment 09/04/24 } }); var css = document.createElement('style'); css.type = 'text/css'; css.innerHTML = '.post-tags { display:none !important } .article-cta a { font-size: 18px; }'; document.body.appendChild(css); //Extra //This function adds some accessibility needs to the site. function addAlly() { // In this function JQuery is replaced with vanilla javascript functions const imgCont = document.querySelector('.uw-imgcont'); imgCont.setAttribute('aria-label', 'AI news, latest developments'); imgCont.title = 'AI news, latest developments'; imgCont.rel = 'noopener'; document.querySelector('.page-mobile-menu-logo a').title = 'Towards AI Home'; document.querySelector('a.social-link').rel = 'noopener'; document.querySelector('a.uw-text').rel = 'noopener'; document.querySelector('a.uw-w-branding').rel = 'noopener'; document.querySelector('.blog h2.heading').innerHTML = 'Publication'; const popupSearch = document.querySelector$('a.btn-open-popup-search'); popupSearch.setAttribute('role', 'button'); popupSearch.title = 'Search'; const searchClose = document.querySelector('a.popup-search-close'); searchClose.setAttribute('role', 'button'); searchClose.title = 'Close search page'; // document // .querySelector('a.btn-open-popup-search') // .setAttribute( // 'href', // 'https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/search' // ); } // Add external attributes to 302 sticky and editorial links function extLink() { // Sticky 302 links, this fuction opens the link we send to Medium on a new tab and adds a "noopener" rel to them var stickyLinks = document.querySelectorAll('.grid-item.sticky a'); for (var i = 0; i < stickyLinks.length; i++) { /* stickyLinks[i].setAttribute('target', '_blank'); stickyLinks[i].setAttribute('rel', 'noopener'); */ } // Editorial 302 links, same here var editLinks = document.querySelectorAll( '.grid-item.category-editorial a' ); for (var i = 0; i < editLinks.length; i++) { editLinks[i].setAttribute('target', '_blank'); editLinks[i].setAttribute('rel', 'noopener'); } } // Add current year to copyright notices document.getElementById( 'js-current-year' ).textContent = new Date().getFullYear(); // Call functions after page load extLink(); //addAlly(); setTimeout(function() { //addAlly(); //ideally we should only need to run it once ↑ }, 5000); }; function closeCookieDialog (){ document.getElementById("cookie-consent").style.display = "none"; return false; } setTimeout ( function () { closeCookieDialog(); }, 15000); console.log(`%c 🚀🚀🚀 ███ █████ ███████ █████████ ███████████ █████████████ ███████████████ ███████ ███████ ███████ ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ │ │ Towards AI is looking for contributors! │ │ Join us in creating awesome AI content. │ │ Let's build the future of AI together → │ │ https://towardsai.net/contribute │ │ │ └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ `, `background: ; color: #00adff; font-size: large`); //Remove latest category across site document.querySelectorAll('a[rel="category tag"]').forEach(function(el) { if (el.textContent.trim() === 'Latest') { // Remove the two consecutive spaces (  ) if (el.nextSibling && el.nextSibling.nodeValue.includes('\u00A0\u00A0')) { el.nextSibling.nodeValue = ''; // Remove the spaces } el.style.display = 'none'; // Hide the element } }); // Add cross-domain measurement, anonymize IPs 'use strict'; //var ga = gtag; ga('config', 'G-9D3HKKFV1Q', 'auto', { /*'allowLinker': true,*/ 'anonymize_ip': true/*, 'linker': { 'domains': [ 'medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence', 'datasets.towardsai.net', 'rss.towardsai.net', 'feed.towardsai.net', 'contribute.towardsai.net', 'members.towardsai.net', 'pub.towardsai.net', 'news.towardsai.net' ] } */ }); ga('send', 'pageview'); -->