Tracking the Virality of News in Smart Cities

Abstract

Effective communication with citizens is an important goal of smart cities. To this end the digital age offers many mechanisms to not only enable timely communication, but also bilateral communication. Mechanisms such as blog posts and online press releases allow cities and organisations to leverage these benefits. However, to assess the efficacy of these communication mechanisms, cities need to track the virality of the news they publish. To this end we propose a novel architecture that uses natural language processing techniques to track not only the resharing of the original articles, but also other articles and posts about that article. We have developed a prototype implementation of this article and present the interface as well as the results of performance tests.