Blog distillation via sentiment-sensitive link analysis

In this paper we report a new approach to blog distillation, defined as the task in which, given a user query, the system ranks the blogs in descending order of relevance to the query topic. Our approach is based on the idea of adding a link analysis phase to the standard retrieval-by-topicality phase. However, differently from other link analysis methods, we try to analyse whether a given hyperlink is a citation with a positive or a negative nature, i.e., if it expresses approval or disapproval of the linked page by the linking page. We report the results of testing our method on the Blogs08 collection used in the 2008 and 2009 editions of the TREC Blog Track.